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Chapter 1

Liquid Landscape: Estuary, Marsh, Sink, Spring, Shore

The third volume of John James Audubon’s Ornithological Biography (1835) contains a description of the Brown Pelican perched upon a mangrove in the Florida Keys, an image of which appears as Plate 251 in The Birds of America (1827–38; see Figure 1). While the bird is Audubon’s primary interest, he is also fascinated by the “glossy and deep-coloured mangroves on which it nestles,” for at the end of his lengthy description of the Brown Pelican is a short sketch entitled “The Mangrove.”¹ “I am at a loss for an object with which to compare these trees, in order to afford you an idea of them,” Audubon writes, but he settles on the figure of “a tree reversed, and standing on its summit” (386). Audubon asks us to imagine the Florida mangrove as an upside-down tree, the roots of which spread widely above ground while its trunk is submerged below. Unlike most trees, he means to say, mangroves grow low along the earth’s surface and have roots that take hold by spreading outward over the ground rather than delving deeply into it. Such lateral roots present some rather unique spectacles. From the shores of the southernmost edges of Florida, Audubon observes, “the Mangroves extend towards the sea, their hanging branches taking root wherever they come in contact with the bottom” (386). He even notices islands “entirely formed of Mangroves, which raising their crooked and slender stems from a bed of mud, continue to increase until their roots and pendent branches afford shelter to accumulating debris, when the earth is gradually raised above the surface of the water” (386). As Audubon observes, the mangrove trees that cover Florida’s coasts prosper because their roots construct their own solid foundations. As the roots spread outward, sand clings to them, and it is not unusual for a small islet to form where before there was only water. This is why the mangrove tree is sometimes described as “nature’s way of converting water into land.”² Interestingly, the mangrove cannot take root in dry and stable earth; its shallow, lateral roots require wet and unstable ground in order to establish themselves.

Figure 1. John James Audubon, Brown Pelican. The Birds of America (1827–38), Plate 251. The Birds of America, Vols. I–IV, Special Collections, University Library System, University of Pittsburgh.

I begin with Audubon’s reflections on the mangrove because they belong to a large archive of widely circulating materials in which Florida’s shifting ground generates ways to imagine roots in the absence of secure material foundations. During a time when many familiar Anglo-American practices and perceptions of landed possession depended on terra firma, Florida’s shifting ground prompted Audubon and others to speculate on forms of permanent attachment that did not require enclosure, demarcation, and improvement. Such speculation attests that early Americans did not exclusively imagine Florida’s resistance to fixed dwellings, sturdy fences, and cultivated fields as evidence of the region’s destiny to remain an undeveloped, retrograde periphery of an expanding settler empire. In some cases Florida’s fluidity gave Americans useful ways to think beyond concepts of land and attachment that underpinned settler colonialism more broadly.

A number of important studies have documented popular early American associations with the South as a place of underdevelopment, slavery, poverty, and tropicality. After the Revolution, these associations indeed enabled those in more northerly parts of the emergent nation to define the United States as an independent, exceptional republic whose South was an unfortunate aberration in need of reform.³ It was easy to include Florida in this “geographic fantasy” of the South: many visual and written representations produced during the eighteenth century described the region as an uncultivable borderland that was only tenuously connected to the rest of the North American continent.⁴ These descriptions tend to emphasize Florida’s fluid foundations and tropical weather as insurmountable barriers to familiar practices of Anglo-American settlement and habitation; as such they constitute one aspect of an early modern imperial ideology according to which the southern and Caribbean colonies were degenerative environments.⁵

Yet alongside this colonial perspective, Florida also provoked a different conception of the southern borderlands in which resistance to traditional ideals of settlement and cultivation generated useful modes and metaphors of roots and root-taking. While some early British maps and popular agricultural texts such as American Husbandry (1775) declare Floridian ground impossible to divide, enclose, and cultivate—and therefore unfit to join an agricultural empire dependent upon a landholding citizenry—other descriptions produced during this same period portray the region’s instability as an opportunity to rethink landholding and settlement altogether. The first surveys of British colonial Florida, produced by William Gerard De Brahm for the British Board of Trade, suggest that the region’s resistance to fixed boundaries and familiar practices of settlement could produce a version of possession amenable to changes in the land. To accommodate such changes, De Brahm drew on multiple discourses of land: the images of Florida in his Report of the General Survey (1772) are indebted not only to a familiar philosophical and legal genealogy of landed possession underpinned by solid ground and articulated most memorably by Locke, but also to geological and legal theories of a changing earth. By accommodating such changes in an official survey, De Brahm implies that incorporating Florida involves accepting that permanent ownership need not rely on stable foundations, and that some fluid southern spaces simply require a version of possession amenable to shifting ground.

This concept of Florida appears also in writing by Bartram, Audubon, and the late nineteenth-century ethnographer Frank Hamilton Cushing, who draws significantly on Bartram’s Travels (1791) when reflecting on the early settlement of Florida’s shifting ground in Report on the Exploration of Ancient Key-Dweller Remains on the Gulf Coast of Florida (1896). Collectively, De Brahm’s shifting shores, Bartram’s water lettuce roots, Audubon’s mangroves, and the Indian mounds of Travels and of Cushing’s Report signal that traditional understandings of land were not capacious enough for many North Americans to imagine either the history of settlement or the future of root-taking on and expansion over the continent. For, from the earliest moments of U.S. nationhood until well into the late nineteenth century, many people embraced versions of land and roots inspired by encounters with the local particularities of Florida, which required a form of ownership involving detachment and mobility, rather than demarcation and enclosure. The case of Florida vividly reminds us that the South had multiple meanings to North Americans across the continent: for while Florida seemed to many people a regrettable deviation from a more acceptable narrative of British colonial identity—and, later, early U.S. identity—to others it gave new and much needed metaphors for considering the variety of forms that founding and belonging could take.

Uncultivable Outpost

In 1763, when Spain ceded Florida to Great Britain on the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War, the challenges posed by Florida’s porous and shifting ground became obstacles to the southern extension of the British Empire in North America. A widespread impression of Florida as a sterile imperial outpost, more Caribbean than continental, prevented British settlers from emigrating to Florida and investing money and time to render it both agriculturally productive and safe from imperial rivals and internal enemies. Seeking to revise this impression, the British Board of Trade undertook a massive information-gathering project that produced new surveys, maps, and natural histories of Florida. The idea was to establish Florida’s contours, describe its inland topography, and verify its connection to the North American continent once and for all, steps designed to attract a landholding populace to the region.⁶

The project had a dramatic effect on many popular images of Florida: during the 1760s and 1770s, on important maps of North America, the geographic shape of Florida altered, solidifying from islands to peninsula. The alteration is evident in a comparison of two maps by the same cartographer, the first created in 1755 (Figure 2), prior to British possession of Florida, and the second created after, in 1772 (Figure 3). Whereas the former map displays a region broken into elusive islands, as it had appeared on important European maps of North America since the beginning of the eighteenth century, the latter map, based largely on the board’s surveys, communicates a new understanding of Florida as a solid, integrated, and cultivable region that materially resembles the rest of North America.⁷

Maps of Florida during this period are one of several discourses through which British officials sought to attract prospective settlers to Florida by assuring them that the new colony was on a developmental path from elusive, tropical edge of North America to integrated, contiguous extension of the continental mainland. In what has been called “the first campaign of publicity for Florida,” promotional tracts and advertisements hailing Florida’s fertility, and announcing a policy granting one hundred acres of land to every head of family, circulated widely in North American and British newspapers, books, and periodicals.⁸ Challenging this narrative of progress, however, other writers perpetuated an idea of Florida as fluid ground irremediably resistant to settlement.

Figure 2. Emanuel Bowen, An Accurate Map of North America (1755), detail. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

American Husbandry (1775), published in London “By an American” and purporting to offer objective evaluations of each American colony’s agricultural capacity, is an especially memorable example of a popular text that casts Florida as a hopeless deviation from the rest of North America in its total resistance to improvement.⁹ The author blithely approves of New England: “cultivated, inclosed, and cheerful,” the place so greatly resembles Old England that, “In the best cultivated parts of it, you would not … know … that you were from home” (46). “The Floridas,” however, are unique, even among southern colonies, for their hostility to the transformative power of the plow. All southern colonies have some section of uncultivable land, typically in the form of a “flat sandy coast, full of swamps and marshes.” Florida, however, is “nothing else but the flat sandy country”; it is all “maritime”—all coast (363–64). There is no “back country” to cultivate, no “proper soil” to enclose and plant with the useful crops that other colonies produce (364, 365). And Florida’s geography enhances its fruitlessness: because Florida both “extends much to the south of any of our other colonies” and “forms a peninsula” that juts into the sea, “The rains … are almost incessant,” making it “very unhealthy” indeed (363). “Fact, and not opinion,” declares that Floridian soil is “such as no person would move to, from the worst of our colonies, in order to cultivate” (365). In Florida the plain facts of topography and geography combine, as they do nowhere else in the actual or prospective American colonies, to preclude cultivation, the basis of settler imperialism. At best, Florida may serve England as an outpost of empire where the “proper accommodations for shipping” may be stored; but “as to planting, none should be encouraged” (373). This description, though probably at least partly politically motivated, nonetheless accurately conveys a widespread British perception of Florida as a tropical backwater, topographically and geographically unfit for British citizens.¹⁰

Figure 3. Emanuel Bowen, An Accurate Map of North America (1772), detail. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

Emanuel Bowen’s maps and American Husbandry concisely capture both sides of a major debate about Floridian ground in the wake of Great Britain’s acquisition of Florida from Spain: while some British observers championed the peninsula’s capacity for improvement, others denigrated it as hopelessly retrograde. Yet it is important to recognize that a common perspective on land underpins and motivates both ways of responding to Florida: defenders and deniers of Florida’s potential for cultivation alike idealize solid, stable, contiguous land as the only acceptable basis of a settler empire. This is not surprising, considering the ideologies of landed possession that were most familiar during the eighteenth century.

Some of the period’s most highly regarded philosophical discussions of property and possession held that unvarying, solid, and divisible ground necessarily stabilized a polity, for such ground was the only kind that could be “subdued” and “improved,” acts that were critical to demonstrating and sustaining possession. An especially influential formulation of this idea may be found in John Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690), in which Locke famously declares that “Whatsoever then [man] removes out of the state that nature hath provided … he hath mixed his labour with … and thereby makes it his property.”¹¹ Through labor we “inclose [property] from the common,” for otherwise land would remain as subject to ingress and egress as the sea, “that great and still remaining common of mankind.”¹² Drawing on Locke, philosophers of the Enlightenment such as David Hume also rule out the possibility of possessing the sea, which is “incapable of becoming the property of any nation” because we cannot “form any … distinct relation with it, as may be the foundation of property.”¹³ Locke, Hume, and other well-known philosophers of landed possession prioritize subdivision, demarcation, and enclosure, pursuits that would be impossible in the absence of solid ground.

Within a context of thinking about land as the opposite of sea, which by nature prevents the “distinct relation” that permits property, it is no wonder that fluid ground appears inimical to settler imperialism: this project depends on a genealogy of land and settlement that excluded shifting foundations. It is instructive to keep this fact in mind as we read late eighteenth-century reflections on North American ground, particularly in texts that circulated widely in North America before, during, and after the Revolution. At the earliest moments of the founding of the United States, readers across North America were steeped in an intellectual tradition that could not accommodate unfirm ground. For example, in Letters from an American Farmer (1782), Crèvecoeur’s Farmer James envisions British North America as a polity of autonomous and independent yeomen achieving “ample subsistence” by dividing and laboring on the land.¹⁴ Letters is an idealized version of the agrarianism Jefferson espouses in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), for Jefferson’s own notion of the emergent United States as an expanding “empire of liberty” involves more mobility, exchange, and commerce than Farmer James endorses; yet even visions of a republic only partly sustained by small farmers still require a substantial amount of cultivable ground.¹⁵ While of course North Americans always debated the importance and role of agriculture in the ideal political economy, it is safe to say that, well into the nineteenth century, unvarying, solid, divisible ground remained important to the political “stability” of the republic at large.¹⁶

This is not to say that North Americans were unfamiliar with ways to improve and profit from watery land. After all, roughly 41.3 million acres of wetland stretched from New England to Georgia, and North American colonists could easily find instructions for enclosing and draining swamps, such as those in Book III of Thomas Hale’s Compleat Body of Husbandry (1756).¹⁷ Southeastern swamps in particular provided resources including beaver and timber, and proved ideal ground for rice cultivation. Many swamps and wetlands were “redeemed”: some of the earliest European settlers of North America transformed wetlands through agriculture, and tidewater planters learned to use tidal ebbs and flows to drain and irrigate fields.¹⁸ Even surveying the swamp was sometimes possible, at least if we believe William Byrd of Westover, who conducted a party of surveyors through the Great Dismal in 1728 in order to mark the colonial boundary between Virginia and North Carolina. Although Byrd declares that “we found the ground moist and trembling under our feet like a quagmire,” and that “every step made a deep impression, which was instantly filled with water,” he reports that his surveyors carried the surveying chain “right forward, without suffering themselves to be turned out of the way by any obstacle whatever,” successfully completing what Byrd has no trouble imagining as a line that “shall hereafter stand as the true boundary.”¹⁹

Yet these instances of swamp survey and cultivation took place on parts of the continent that, for all their fluidity, were more solid than most of Florida. We need only turn to the environmental history of the Everglades to perceive that eighteenth-century British and North American impressions of Florida as a liquid landscape, differing fundamentally from the rest of the continent, are based in reality. More than half of the peninsula’s 20.3 million acres was once swampland.²⁰ While twentieth- and twenty-first-century developers have drained and filled in significant swaths of South Florida, prior to reclamation efforts the Everglades more or less began where water “overspilled [Lake Okeechobee’s] south shore,” and from there they “spread out, and then slowly crept in a sheet, fifty miles wide and six inches deep,” constituting more than 2.3 million acres of slowly moving water.²¹ And it was not just the sheer extent of the Everglades that made Florida unusually fluid; tidal erosion of the shoreline, seasonal fluctuations in the water table, an inordinate amount of rainfall, and frequent hurricanes also combined to render Florida all “maritime,” in the words of American Husbandry.²²

Both coastally and inland, Florida fluctuated as no other part of the continent. This fact was advertised with particular force during the nineteenth century by repeated failures of efforts to survey, drain, and enclose the Everglades, which mostly remained “a distant wilderness” to those living in other parts of the United States.²³ And settlers’ guides to antebellum Florida attest that its status as an elusive borderland with a debatable connection to the continent persisted long after the British Board of Trade sought to revise this impression during the 1760s. One especially popular guide to Territorial Florida declares the nation’s recent addition a “curiously shaped and curiously formed terminal appendage to the great United States,” and includes questions that cannot but raise doubt about Florida’s contiguity and connection: are the Keys “fragments of the continent, torn by the abrasion of the tide,” or are they “additions, constantly increased” by the growth of coral reefs? Have the Everglades “recently risen from the ocean? Is the land still rising?”²⁴ Thus, even as the writers of such guides sought to draw prospective settlers to Florida, they questioned its capacity to sustain settlement because they could not help speculating that the region was formed by unique processes and materials other than unvarying, solid, divisible ground.

These and other texts attest that, to many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century observers, Florida never quite shed its status as an elusive, underdeveloped borderland. In this way such texts establish that people frequently responded to Florida in much the same way that they responded to other southern spaces as unfortunate exceptions to the culture developing on the rest of the continent. Yet such texts also reveal that, in the case of Florida, this familiar mode of response was largely conditioned by the fact that people lacked a language for describing and imagining radically shifting ground as an integral part of North America. For familiar Anglophone philosophical discourses of landed possession offered no vocabulary for thinking through the incorporation of ground that shifts, seeps, expands, and erodes.²⁵ Put otherwise, salient rhetorical, geographical, and historical conceptions of empires and nations as reliant on unvarying, solid, divisible ground provided a context within which Florida’s porosity and liquidity signaled its tenuous connection to or total exclusion from North America.

And yet, to many people, Florida’s liquid landscape meant something else. During a time when dominant discussions of settlement, private property, cultivation, political economy, and even swampland redemption afforded no way to describe Florida as land or property, some eighteenth-century observers did both. Though it required a conceptual leap, William Gerard De Brahm, first surveyor of British colonial Florida, devised a land survey that accommodates shifting, seeping, “changeable” ground. His surveys reveal that the same particularities of Floridian ground that resisted familiar practices of Anglo-American settlement and habitation also generated new ways to take root. De Brahm’s Florida surveys provided British and U.S. observers one way to envision Florida as an extension of North America. And just as importantly they also provide scholars one set of materials through which to perceive early American interest in a version of landed possession that did not descend entirely from a philosophical genealogy inherited through Locke and Hume.

William Gerard De Brahm on the Florida Shore

In 1764, during the year following Great Britain’s acquisition of Florida from Spain, the British Board of Trade appointed De Brahm to the position of surveyor general of the Southern District of North America. As such he would administer the massive project of surveying and mapping all British holdings south of the Potomac, though the board prioritized Florida, and particularly the area from St. Augustine south to the tip of the peninsula.²⁶ Accordingly De Brahm moved from Georgia to St. Augustine, and the following year he began surveying East Florida by following the board’s instructions to focus specifically on the coastlands they believed to have the most potential for settlement: those stretching along the eastern side of the peninsula from St. Augustine to Cape Florida at present-day Miami.²⁷

De Brahm’s surveys were to guide the board’s decisions about precisely where “a loyal landowning citizenry” would thrive, though De Brahm was also personally invested in locating the most valuable lands. His position as surveyor general meant that British landholders could commission him privately for small-scale surveys of particular tracts they planned to develop.²⁸ In fact, without such commissions, De Brahm would not have secured the patronage necessary to complete The Report of the General Survey, a detailed narrative in which he describes the character of Floridian ground.²⁹

The Report, which De Brahm personally presented to King George III in manuscript form during 1773, proved valuable not only to the board but also to private parties, including members of the Cape Florida Society, a group of European investors who met informally in London to plan a colony along the Florida coast near present-day Miami.³⁰ While the Report remained unpublished in its entirety until the twentieth century, a London publisher issued an excerpt of it in 1772 as an independent volume called The Atlantic Pilot. London reviewers hailed the work as a “small but elegant performance” and evidence of the author’s “fidelity, accuracy, and diligence” in carrying out his commission, and an American bookseller at Charleston quickly imported a supply of the Pilot.³¹ De Brahm’s detailed descriptions of the Florida coast and Atlantic Ocean currents proved particularly useful to several subsequent eighteenth- and nineteenth-century surveyors, many of whom employed the Pilot in their own publications. As The Journal of Andrew Ellicott (Philadelphia, 1803) attests, the well-known surveyor of the boundary line between the United States and the Spanish colonies of East and West Florida preferred De Brahm’s discussion of the Gulf Stream in the Pilot to Benjamin Franklin’s more widely known work on this topic.³² For our present purposes the Pilot indeed repays careful scrutiny, particularly with regard to two large foldout maps featuring South Florida and the Florida Keys: Chart of the South End of East Florida and Martiers (1772; Figure 4) and The Ancient Tegesta, Now Promontory of East Florida (1772; Figure 5). Funded by and produced for prospective settlers, these maps describe the same stretch of coast near Miami; yet upon first consideration they suggest that Florida as a whole could never sustain permanent settlement.

Figure 4. William Gerard De Brahm, “Chart of the South End of East Florida and Martiers” (1772). HM 121784, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Images of Florida in the published portions of the Report depict a place that collapses the absolute distinction between water and soil. A comparison of two images in particular reveals land in flux. Chart of the South End of East Florida and The Ancient Tegesta describe the swath of coastland and shoals that stretches from Cape Florida, just barely visible in the upper right corner, to the Dry Tortugas, visible in the lower left corner. Yet ground shaded in dark gray as submerged shoal or sandbank in Chart (Figure 4) is outlined as a firm part of the peninsula in Tegesta (Figure 5). We can see the clearest example of this change when we compare the Dry Tortugas, depicted at the bottom left corner of each image. The Tortugas of Figure 4 are tiny islets, west of Key West, just as they accurately appear on twenty-first-century maps of Florida; yet those of Figure 5 are substantial landmasses. The “Tortuga Shoal” of each document strikingly illustrates the alteration, for the chain of islets that resembles an oval-shaped atoll in Figure 4 appears as a full-blown island of nearly the same shape in Figure 5.

Figure 5. William Gerard De Brahm, “The Ancient Tegesta, Now Promontory of East Florida (as it appears from its present Condition, many marks and traces what it with great probability can be ascertained to have been in former Ages …)” (1772). Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

De Brahm’s title for Figure 5 partly explains the reason for the differences between the images: he calls Figure 5 The Ancient Tegesta, Now Promontory of East Florida (as it appears from its present Condition, many marks and traces what it with great probability can be ascertained to have been in former Ages…). Thus, whereas Figure 4 describes the land as it is, Figure 5 portrays it as it formerly existed.³³ In other words, using the remaining physical “marks and traces” of its former outline, De Brahm fills in the figure of the Florida “Tegesta,” using a name for the peninsula that he derives from the Tequesta, one of Florida’s many indigenous societies that the Spanish, along with internecine warfare, had largely decimated long before De Brahm’s arrival in Florida.³⁴

Whatever the reason De Brahm provides for Florida’s substantially different appearances in each image, the effect of viewing both together is that mainland Florida appears to have dissolved; and the narrative accompanying the images reveals that this dissolution was ongoing at the time. For De Brahm explains that he considers coastal Florida evidence that “the Continent has been, and is to this day subject to yield its Limits foot by foot to the [Gulf] Stream.”³⁵ During three years in Florida, he explains, he and his assistants “have observed many Places, where fresh Encroachments [of ocean on land] appear to this Effect,” noting that trees growing in the water “between the Islands and the Main testify, that they lay on the Spot of the former Continent.” Indeed, while all North America dissolves, Florida dissolves so obviously that it offers “Testimonies, if not evident Proofs, that the [Gulf] Stream … does not give up any of its Acquisitions, or exchange old Possessions in lieu, as Seas, and Rivers are well known to do in all Parts of the known World.”³⁶ For although the surveying crew searched for places where the ground had expanded and “taken Possession of Limits deserted by the Stream,” none could be found. In fact, the Florida Keys, once contiguous with the mainland, now represent the mere outlines of its “probable Ancient figure,” which the sea continues to encroach upon, tearing the land “into so many Subdivisions” before one’s very eyes. In short, what we see when we look at Florida is not permanent land, but ground in a state of dissolution, bound to erode and leave behind only traces of its former shape.

These observations on Florida set De Brahm apart from the typical surveyor because they suggest that he was interested not only in individual plots of land, but also in the larger whole to which they belonged.³⁷ His documentation of changing land within a survey was unusual enough that one fellow surveyor of Florida, Bernard Romans, looked unfavorably on The Atlantic Pilot: in the natural history of Florida that Romans published in New York in 1775, he declared that De Brahm’s work bore “marks of insanity.” Referring specifically to the images presented in Figures 4 and 5 above, Romans writes that “here we see an account of an unnatural change in the face of the country, which for many reasons never could have happened …; he turns one peninsula into broken islands, another into sunken rocks; … in this unmeaning chaos he joins and disjoins, turns water into land, and land into water.”³⁸ Yet a more likely reason for De Brahm’s interest in recording exchanges of water and land is that he was not only an experienced surveyor, but also a polymath whose many interests included geography, engineering, botany, astronomy, meteorology, hydrography, alchemy, and even mystical philosophy.³⁹ Educated and widely read, he was keenly interested in the natural world and a range of religious and scientific discourses, and his Report offers strong evidence that these interests directly informed his thinking about land.⁴⁰ Historians of geography have considered De Brahm more geographer than surveyor, and a careful reading of the Report reveals that De Brahm was also a “geotheorist”—the term historians now use to refer to the group of earth scientists who directly preceded the disciplinary rise of geology.

Of all the ways of thinking about land that De Brahm could have drawn on in Florida, geotheory was most useful because of its commitment to explaining and predicting changes in the land. Unlike geologists, such as Georges Cuvier and Charles Lyell, who would correctly hypothesize that earth was radically unstable and unpredictable in its changes, geotheorists, such as Horace-Bénédict de Saussure and James Hutton, held that earth operated according to a set of predictable Newtonian mechanical laws.⁴¹ A brief comparison of De Brahm’s Report and Hutton’s “Theory of the Earth” (1788) suggests that De Brahm was geotheorizing in Florida. His perception of the Florida Keys as fragments outlining the peninsula’s “probable ancient Figure” accords with Hutton’s discovery that all discernible land exhibits “certain means to read the annals of a former earth.”⁴² Likewise, De Brahm’s observation that the Florida shore “yields its Limits foot by foot to the [Gulf] Stream” matches Hutton’s finding that “[all] land is perishing continually.”⁴³

And De Brahm’s indebtedness to geotheory becomes especially evident when we perceive that his observations largely conform to a “uniformitarian” view of earth’s changes. The well-known debate between theorists of “uniformitarianism,” who asserted that earth’s changes were uniform, and those of “catastrophism,” who argued that changes were sudden, crystallized in the publication of the final volume of Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1832), which supported a uniformitarian view.⁴⁴ However the debate began with the geotheorists long before the rise of geology. In fact, Lyell’s belief that the earth was a “steady-state system” recalls aspects of Hutton’s earlier contention that all land not only “[perishes] continually” but also revives proportionally, with the overall amount of land on the planet remaining the same.⁴⁵ In general, De Brahm believes with Hutton in both erosion and the “existence of … productive causes, which are now laying the foundation of land … which will, in time, give birth to future continents.”⁴⁶ Florida, however, proves an exception to this rule; for De Brahm asserts that the peninsula’s ever-eroding shores illustrate that the Gulf Stream “does not give up any of its Acquisitions, or exchange old Possessions in lieu, as Seas, and Rivers are known to do in all Parts of the known World.”⁴⁷ While geotheory offered the most useful language for describing Florida, even this science could not entirely account for a place where the sea fails to replenish what it continually wears away.

De Brahm’s commitment to recording Florida’s dissolution derives from his interest in geotheoretical speculation, yet it nonetheless appears antithetical to his explicit intention to attract investors and emigrants, a project that relied on portraying the ground as static, as historians of geography and property have shown. De Brahm was commissioned to produce both a largescale survey of Florida and several smaller-scale “plats,” documents containing a sketch and verbal description of an individual plot of ground. By and large, eighteenth-century land surveys aimed to stabilize the land record and thereby enable people to imagine themselves and their communities as firmly emplaced within national or imperial territory. And the plat served a particularly important role in this process: as Brückner explains, it was intended to facilitate an individual proprietor’s “strong sense of personal geodetic emplacement.”⁴⁸ The plat conventionally fostered this sense by representing land as immovable and personalizing the representation with an inscription of the proprietor’s family name. In fact, the plat was an important discourse through which North Americans affirmed their ownership of “a particular locus in space and time”; a genre that became surprisingly popular in the eighteenth century in both Great Britain and North America, the plat placed individuals “inside a land- and map-based economy,” and thereby fostered a Lockean version of “modern autonomous existence.”⁴⁹

As an experienced surveyor, De Brahm knew the conventions and objectives of surveys and plats. Furthermore, there is no reason to question his stated intention to attract settlers to Florida. Referring to an area he depicts at the right of Figures 4 and 5, De Brahm reports sincerely that “Settlers especially at Cape Florida will be much better off than all others on any Place I know upon the Eastern Coast of America.”⁵⁰ Yet how is it possible that, in one description of Cape Florida, he suggests the entire cape dissolves, while in another he labels a plot of ground with a prospective settler’s family name?

De Brahm’s turn to geotheory within a survey ultimately suggests that Florida’s dramatic dissolution did not suggest to him what it suggested to the author of American Husbandry and many other observers who declared colonial Florida inimical to British settlers. Rather than interpreting Florida as the doomed periphery of empire, De Brahm considers it an occasion to seek a new language to describe shifting ground as land and even as property. In other words, his commitments to surveying and geotheorizing were not antithetical; rather, geotheory gave De Brahm a much-needed vocabulary for portraying the liquid landscape in a genre committed to fostering a sense of “self-assertion” and “autonomous existence” in the service of possession, settlement, and imperial expansion. For De Brahm grasped that land is more constantly changeable than it appears, and he found Florida an especially obvious conceptual challenge to discourses that assumed land’s stability. But by surveying obviously unstable ground, he indicated that land’s instability did not have to compromise one’s personal and permanent attachment to it. By furnishing a way to imagine the liquid landscape as property, his work resonates strikingly with another discourse in which possession did not require stability.

In riparian law, shifting, seeping, and eroding land had shaped the terms of possession since the Middle Ages. Just as the emergent discourse of geology did, this area of property law recognized that not all ground is made of the “sound good loam” and “proper soil” that American Husbandry overtly—and the founders implicitly—deemed land.⁵¹ Additionally, riparian law demonstrated that there was a way to possess watery ground, although such ground demanded a different language and ideal of possession than did the terra firma of the founders.

Sir Matthew Hale’s De Jure Maris (written in 1670 and published in 1787) and Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–69) identify and discuss a variety of “incidentals,” such as adjacent water and shores, that cannot be subject to the same laws of ownership that govern solid ground. In the language with which both legal theorists discuss shifting coastal lands in particular, instability alters the nature of proprietorship but does not prevent possession. For example, according to Blackstone, when the sea “make[s] terra firma”—that is, when the sea recedes so that the land increases—the individual riparian proprietor quite frequently gains whatever land the sea leaves behind.⁵² On the other hand, as Hale explains, “If a subject hath land adjoining the sea, and the violence of the sea swallow it up,” then the riparian proprietor does not suffer a total loss: particularly if he can show “reasonable marks” of where the land once was, then his full rights to the original space remain, and he may even regain it from the sea through ditching and draining if possible.⁵³ Blackstone’s and Hale’s reflections on riparian rights suggest that instability does not prevent possession, but merely changes the nature of it. For a proprietor who is aware that his lands may change as the waters increase or recede need not necessarily lose his livelihood thereby, as long as he is prepared to adapt to this eventuality. While, unlike De Brahm, theorists of riparian law assume that land both erodes and expands, the underlying logic is strikingly similar: in both cases, the recognition of land’s impermanence does not compromise possession, although it may introduce new possibilities for and models of proprietorship.

Considered broadly, De Brahm’s riparian and geotheoretically inflected reflections on Florida in the Report signal the limits of familiar political and philosophical discussions that did not recognize inherently unstable ground as land. They suggest that imagining how to stake claim to North American ground requires departing from these discussions, and in this way they differ significantly from those of many of De Brahm’s contemporaries who, as we have seen, either explicitly or implicitly positioned Florida as resistant or threatening to settler colonialism on the basis of its instability. For by accommodating the liquid landscape with a language that could enable his readers to envision it as land and property, De Brahm offered a way to perceive Florida as part of North America. The Report attests that Florida prompted De Brahm to make mobility central to the survey, and thus to expand the very notion of what counted as “land”—that is, as ground that could stabilize and thereby count as politically significant.

De Brahm’s survey signals that the material realities of Florida would prompt people to revise traditional thinking about how to achieve permanent possession, and about what kinds of land are acceptable bases of a polity dependent on such possession. Finally, however, it provokes questions that it does not entirely answer. For what would possession in the absence of stability actually look like? What new relation to land would it require of a proprietor? And how might these changes to the concept of landholding change the imagination of settlement and the pursuit of expansion on the continent? For fuller accounts of Florida roots and some of their larger prospects, we may turn to the work of two subsequent writers who also glimpsed the intersection of Locke and the liquid landscape in Florida.

William Bartram’s Mobile Roots

In the Introduction to this book I discuss Bartram’s encounter with “floating islands” of water lettuce, or Pistia stratiotes, along the St. Johns River. In Travels (1791) Bartram is struck by the plant’s capacity to weather the sudden alterations of a landscape where water and land change places with little warning. Though jostled by winds and currents that continually drive the plants from shore and break their communities “to pieces,” the water lettuce always manages to “find footing” and a place to “spread and extend” once more. Such resilience is the result of “long fibrous roots”: rather than fixing the plant in place, which would guarantee uprooting, these roots enable mobility, and thereby ensure stability and longevity.⁵⁴

I return now to Bartram’s reflection on water lettuce to place it in dialogue with other passages on root-taking in Travels as a way of tracking the text’s investment in the same topic that occupies De Brahm: human habitation of shifting ground. Human root-taking in Florida was never far from Bartram’s mind, a fact that is especially apparent when he concludes his reflection on water lettuce with the following observation: “These floating islands present a very entertaining prospect; for … [in] the imagination … we … see them compleatly inhabited, and alive, with crocodiles, serpents, frogs, otters, crows, herons, curlews, jackdaws, &c. there seems, in short, nothing wanted but the appearance of a wigwam and a canoe to complete the scene.”⁵⁵ The concluding vision of a wigwam complements Bartram’s earlier descriptions of the plant as a being that “associates” in “communities” that “find footing” and form “colonies”: such language encourages us to read the reverie as a reflection on human roots, an encouragement amplified by similarities Bartram suggests between water lettuce roots and Indian mounds.

Scholars have shown that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century interest in Indian mounds focused primarily on determining the mounds’ origins. Thus the interest was not only anthropological but also deeply political.⁵⁶ For example, when Thomas Jefferson and others theorized that the mounds were made by a population of non-Indian “mound-builders” who mysteriously vanished before the arrival of the “savage” Indians currently occupying the land, they fashioned a “Mound Builder myth” that licensed Indian removal on the grounds that Indians were not indigenous.⁵⁷ This myth persisted as a way of invalidating Indian land claims until the late nineteenth century, though not without contest from writers such as Bartram, who claimed that the mounds were Indian in origin and should thus be considered proof of Indian indigeneity and rights to the land.⁵⁸

While the mounds’ origins certainly concerned Bartram, he was interested not only in who built the mounds, but also why they were built and how the original builders used them. At several points in Travels Bartram reviews existing theories of the intended purpose of the mounds. For example, he considers and then rejects the idea that the mounds were “sepulchres” for a funerary ritual; entertains the possibility that they were “designed … to some religious purpose, as great altars and temples”; and speculates that they were “raised in part for ornament and recreation,” or simply as “monuments of magnificence, to perpetuate the power and grandeur of the nation.”⁵⁹ Yet most persuasive to Bartram is another theory, which he derives from an encounter with a particular mound standing “in a level plain” near the bank of the Savannah River.

The mound, he reasons, must have enabled the community to remain on ground that could become water with little warning. For after puzzling over “what could have induced the Indians to raise such a heap of earth” in a place so frequently “subject to inundations,” Bartram hypothesizes that the mound acted as an “island,” “raised for a retreat and refuge” “In case of an inundation, which are unforeseen and surprise them very suddenly, spring and autumn” (325–26). In other words, rather than building “settled habitations” on frequently inundated land, the Indians established themselves by building temporary dwelling places that they could easily abandon for higher ground when the waters suddenly rose.

Bartram’s claim that mounds enabled Indians to establish themselves on shifting ground is more than an assertion of Indian land rights on the basis of indigeneity; the claim also suggests that Indian inhabitance of the land was durable, and that this endurance resulted from a capacity to adapt to land’s impermanence. This suggestion is important because it debunks the mound-builder myth in a way that resists co-optation by supporters of U.S. expansion. For, as Annette Kolodny shows, it was not always enough to prove that Indians had built the mounds, as scientists finally did during the 1890s.⁶⁰ For one thing, many observers interpreted the mounds as structures that enabled their builders to live nomadically, and nomads did not count as proprietors according to law. Yet Bartram’s interpretation of mounds suggests a way out of this logic. By describing mounds as both the product of indigenous Indians and a sign of their capacity to endure on the land, Bartram fashions the earthen heaps as material evidence that Indians developed a complex form of land-based possession. Put otherwise, on the same ground where recently built British plantations lie in ruins, mounds endure as “monuments” attesting that prehistoric Indians, ancestors of those populating the land to this day, ably anchored themselves to the land via mobile roots.

While the broader political implications of mobile roots remain undeveloped in Travels, they were not lost on a late nineteenth-century reader of the text. Bartram’s mobile roots enjoy an interesting afterlife in the work of ethnographer Frank Hamilton Cushing, who considered Bartram a fellow member of the American Philosophical Society and “the source of more definite information regarding the southern Indians than those of any other one of our earlier authorities on the natives of northerly Florida and contiguous States.”⁶¹ In Cushing’s Report on the Exploration of Ancient Key-Dweller Remains, a narrative of archaeological discoveries about Florida’s Calusa Indians, he uses Travels and another text by Bartram, “Observations on the Creek and Cherokee Indians” (1788), to imaginatively reconstruct the environment and daily lives of the Southeast’s prehistoric cultures.⁶²

Cushing’s conclusion that Florida’s early inhabitants remained on unstable ground by refusing firm fixity strikingly echoes Bartram’s descriptions of Florida roots in Travels. For example, the language of Bartram’s reverie on “floating islands” of water lettuce suffuses Cushing’s descriptions of excavated architectural remains of Calusa Indian “pile dwellings,” which Cushing calls “floating quays.”⁶³ At “the Court of the Pile Dwellers,” an archaeological site on Key Marco in Southwest Florida, Cushing finds the remains of Calusa homes that are floating islands for some of the same reasons that Bartram uses the metaphor. Each home, Cushing explains, consisted of a horizontal, “partially movable platform” of timber, to the bottom of which vertical “piles” or “pillars” were affixed (34). These piles extended downward into the water to support the timber platform and keep it above the sea’s surface, much as the posts of a stilted house might. Yet, unlike stilts, the piles were not fixed firmly to the ground. Rather, they “rested upon, but had not been driven into” the top of artificial mounds or “benches” of “solid shell and clay marl” that the Calusa had built on the sea floor. The piles remained unfixed “so that as long as the water remained low, they would support these house scaffolds above it, as well as if driven into the benches.” However, “when the waters rose, the entire structures would also slightly rise, or at any rate not be violently wrenched from their supports, as would inevitably have been the case had these [supports] been firmly fixed below.” Cushing’s description unmistakably recalls the roots of Bartram’s water lettuce. Both pile-dwelling and plant remain upright by not being “firmly fixed” to the ground. Just as the water lettuce roots “descend from the nether center, downwards, towards the muddy bottom,” the piles extend downward, yet “had not been driven into” the ocean floor. And Cushing’s observation that, “when the waters rose, the entire structures would also slightly rise,” echoes Bartram’s statement that “when the river is suddenly raised” the water lettuce would rise and “float about.”

Cushing’s indebtedness to Bartram underscores the ethnographic and political implications of Florida roots in Travels. These implications emerge even more forcefully when Cushing draws on Bartram to describe Indian mounds.⁶⁴ According to Cushing, the Calusa eventually built mounds in Florida, and thereafter throughout much of North America, for the same reason that they originally built pile-dwellings on the sea: they needed to maintain stability on radically unstable foundations. Cushing’s “theory of the origin of mound-building” holds that the mounds were built by the descendants of Indians living in “sea environments” to the “far south” of the continent. These Indians transmitted “ancestral ideas of habitation … down from generation to generation, and so, slowly up into the land” (81, 74). Over time, as the Indians moved north to inland Florida, they found that mounds suited Florida’s “peculiarly unstable” ground, which Cushing describes as “soluble,” “pervious limestone” that is “subject to undermining by … corrosive” rain and rivers; pocketed with sinkholes that “[fall] in” to form deep lakes and morasses; threaded by “subterranean rivers”; and ravaged by “the hurricane” that, “in a land so broken and low,” causes “continuous change of shore-line” (67).

But the mound-builders eventually moved farther north than Florida. For “the great and regular mounds and other earth-works occurring in the lowlands of our Southern and Middle Western States, and celebrated as the remains of the so-called mound-builders, may likewise also be traced … to a similar beginning in some seashore and marshland environment” (15). Cushing imagines mounds throughout the continent as “islands … on high land” that prove his topographic theory that, until recently, most of the continent exhibited “conditions like those presented by the southern marshy shorelands” (76). In other words, Florida offers a good approximation of what North America was like: “the whole region”—by which he means most of the continent—was “suited to such modes of life as I have referred to, even well on toward modern times” (78).

Cushing’s observations in the Report amount to the conclusion that mound-builders were the most able claimants of continental ground because of their capacity to remain on changing earth. This conclusion depends in part on Cushing’s reading of Bartram on early Florida’s landscape and the populations who managed to remain there. But even more importantly for our purposes, Cushing’s conclusion elucidates the relevance of Bartram’s mobile roots to later U.S. interpretations of the history and legacy of continental settlement and expansion. By suggesting that Floridian foundations reflect the character of the continent as a whole, Cushing suggests an alternate narrative of North America’s settlement. His work signals that, both during and long after the last quarter of the eighteenth century that has been this chapter’s historical focus, Florida provoked many North Americans to imagine those who managed to establish themselves on shifting ground as the rightful possessors of the continent.

* * *

While all the writers examined above recognize early Florida’s dramatic dissolution, some perceive this solubility as something other than a threat to familiar Anglo-American settlement practices. For Audubon, De Brahm, Bartram, and Cushing, Florida provided useful metaphors for imagining land and inhabitance. Their reflections on mangrove trees, shifting shores, water lettuce roots, Indian mounds, and Calusa dwellings affirm the habitability of Florida’s liquid land, albeit by way of alternate practices of possession according to which mobility secures longevity, stability, and endurance.⁶⁵ Collectively such work reveals that Florida provided many early Americans with a way to imagine roots that are no less secure for their lack of fixity.

The following chapter continues to chart the influence of Florida’s fluidity on broader narratives of North American settlement, this time by turning to another set of materials: eighteenth-century European and American maps of Florida as islands. Such maps enable us to place Florida’s topographic porosity in a broad geopolitical context, and to see that it disrupted a politically significant visual narrative of North America as a contiguous, self-enclosed, sharply defined landmass. By broadcasting Florida’s soluble, corrosive, hurricane-swept, porous, and fragmented ground, maps of Florida as islands provide us with one way to see beyond the more familiar cartographic discourse of continental integrity that would underpin U.S. nationalism by minimizing or erasing the spatial fluidity and demographic heterogeneity of the early United States.