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Chapter 2

Island Nation: Shoal, Isle, Islet

Amos Doolittle’s Map of the United States of America (Figure 6), one of the first maps of North America to be published in the United States, first appeared in 1784 in geographer Jedidiah Morse’s popular textbook, Geography Made Easy, which Morse hoped would inspire young readers to “imbibe an acquaintance with their own country, and an attachment to its interests” during the immediate aftermath of the Revolutionary War.¹ A staunch Federalist, Morse believed that “the United States, and indeed all parts of North-America, seem to have been formed by nature for the most intimate union.”² Doolittle’s map visually underscores this early precursor of the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny by illustrating the emerging U.S. nation-state as a contiguous territory stretching from British Canada to Spanish Florida, and bordered sharply on the west and east by the Mississippi River and the Atlantic Ocean, respectively.

As recent scholarship on the history of cartography has shown, early modern maps frequently “produced” space: by making ideological claims about the areas they represented, rather than reflecting the actual state of geographic knowledge, maps influenced the development of national and imperial identities, boundaries, population patterns, and power relations.³ Doolittle’s map is no exception, for it contributes to a widespread phenomenon in which North Americans of the Revolutionary period proclaimed North America’s “continental status” in a range of texts—including maps, geographies, decorative arts, portraits, classic works of literature, and key political essays and legal documents—as a way of declaring the new country’s independence, sovereignty, and destiny to become a culturally homogeneous nation united under one government.⁴ The figure of the continent continued to serve a range of nationalist purposes long after the Revolution, a fact prompting literary scholar Myra Jehlen’s memorable claim that “the solid reality, the terra firma” of the continent was “the decisive factor shaping the founding conceptions of ‘America’ and ‘the American’” from the early national period until the mid-nineteenth century.⁵

Figure 6. Amos Doolittle, A Map of the United States of America (1784). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Figure 7. Amos Doolittle, A Map of the United States of America (1784), detail. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Considering the continent’s ideological significance during the early national period, it seems surprising upon first consideration that Doolittle’s map does not entirely sustain Morse’s claim that “all parts of North-America” encourage “attachment” and “union”: one prominent part of the map does not describe a solid, contiguous, and self-contained landmass. Morse’s claim falters at the lower right corner of the map, where Florida appears dramatically fragmented into islands that constitute a ragged, fractured southeastern edge of North America (Figure 7). The land is indented by vast harbors and gulfs, broken into five or six large landmasses, and scattered in chains of almost innumerable islets that extend into the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic, almost as though a gigantic wave had swept over the land and left it in shards. Doolittle’s depiction of Florida as islands was not unusual. It conforms to a cartographic convention through which many American and European mapmakers described Florida before, during, and long after the American Revolution.

While a familiar account of the cartographic tradition of Florida as islands suggests that this tradition was an antiquated fiction by the time of the Revolution, the maps themselves offer a different account. They show that this tradition began on the ground in Florida during an early eighteenth-century colonial encounter between English and Indians, and that maps participating in this tradition persisted in print long beyond the mid-eighteenth-century moment when North America ostensibly began to gain continental integrity. Furthermore, a sampling of maps in the island tradition conveys the sense that North American ground is not only fragmented, but also indeterminate, for mapmakers used a variety of different and even conflicting island configurations when attempting to describe the shape of Florida.

The persistence of Florida as indeterminate space on Doolittle’s map and many others of the post-Revolutionary period reminds us that early modern maps frequently participate in multiple representational traditions. For many such maps are not only instruments of ideology, but also—and necessarily—the products of a host of interactions among professional cartographers, amateur mapmakers, and locals who provided information about the land in question.⁶ Thus, while most of Doolittle’s map endorses a popular ideology of the emerging nation-state, expressed through the figure of the continent, the Florida portion furthers another representational tradition that characterizes North American ground and boundaries quite differently.

The representational multiplicity of early national maps of North America depicting Florida as islands announces the contingent, provisional nature of U.S. geographic nationalism.⁷ For the islands of Florida attest that a nonnationalist spatial understanding of North American ground and boundaries persisted into the early national period, and even on some of the same maps that otherwise asserted North America’s continental status. During the same decades when the discourse of U.S. nation-building relied increasingly on North America’s contiguity and self-containment—qualities prized in a range of widely circulating post-Revolutionary documents such as The Federalist Papers and the Northwest Ordinance—North Americans also pondered Florida’s elusive island geography. And even though Florida was not officially U.S. ground until 1821, the islands of Florida encouraged some eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century observers to define the country as something other than a self-enclosed, ever-expanding nation of settlers that would cohere under a strong federal government. Ultimately, early reflections on the islands of Florida—in maps, settlers’ guides, and popular tales such as “The Florida Pirate” (1821)—offer scholars of the early national period a chance to look beyond the spatial abstraction of the continent, which promoted a definition of national identity that was not shared by everyone calling the United States home.⁸

The Origin and Endurance of Islands

In 1775 Bernard Romans, an Anglo-American surveyor, mapmaker, and naturalist, explained that the cartographic tradition of Florida as islands resulted from an interpretive error long since corrected. In A Concise Natural History of East and West Florida (1775), the first natural history of Florida published in North America, Romans attributes the error to a misunderstanding of central Florida’s Lake Okeechobee and the marshy flatlands surrounding it. “This lake,” he writes, “has given rise to the intersected, and mangled condition in which we see the peninsula exhibited in old maps.”⁹

Early Americans considered Romans an authority on Florida. His lavish two-volume natural history, featuring copperplate engravings by Paul Revere and financed by several prominent subscribers including John Adams and John Hancock, secured his election to the American Philosophical Society. In 1804 Charles Brockden Brown eagerly read the Natural History, writing that Florida’s imminent incorporation into the United States rendered the work “uncommonly interesting to the present, and still more to the next generation.”¹⁰ Subsequent natural historians of Florida read Romans with interest, drew on many of the sources that he cited, and repeated many of his claims, including his explanation of outdated maps featuring an “intersected, and mangled” South Florida. One writer confirms in 1823 that the “immense body of low land” constituting the peninsula’s marshy interior is to blame for the error that we see on “ancient maps”: by echoing Romans, yet altering “old maps” to “ancient maps,” this writer relegates the cartographic tradition of islands to an even more distant past.¹¹ Such works indicate that by the time Romans wrote in the mid-1770s, people generally classified a nonpeninsular Florida with other fanciful fictions of Floridian ground, such as the Renaissance idea of Florida as a large island, or the Creek legend, related by William Bartram, that in Florida fugitive Yamasee occupy a part of the Okefenokee Swamp made of “enchanted land … [that] seem[s] to fly before [one], alternately appearing and disappearing.”¹² It seems that, by the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Florida, like the rest of the continent, had traded an antiquated, erroneous reputation as “fragmented, elusive territory” for a new and correct one of physical integrity.¹³

Yet this conclusion fails to account for several facts, including the relatively recent, early eighteenth-century origin of the cartographic tradition of Florida as islands; the persistence of this tradition well beyond the mid-1770s; and the circumstances that actually produced the tradition in the first place. The very first map of Florida as islands appeared in 1708, and thus not at an obscure moment in the distant past, as the terms “old” and “ancient” suggest. And, as Amos Doolittle’s widely circulating map of North America published in 1784 (Figure 7) demonstrates, such maps persisted long after the moment when Romans declared them “old.” In fact, Doolittle’s map is one of at least seventeen maps of North America—of French, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, and English origins—first made between 1708 and 1799 that feature the islands of Florida, and some of these maps were consulted and reprinted long after 1799. Thus, for people in and beyond the United States throughout much of what we now call the early national period, the cartographic tradition of Florida as islands was not “old,” but rather vibrantly ongoing and of recent emergence. And its emergence was not the result of European or American encounters with Lake Okeechobee or the marshes of Florida’s interior; this explanation obscures the tradition’s actual origins in native knowledge that was transmitted to the British conducting Indian slave raids on the Florida peninsula during the first decade of the eighteenth century.

The story of how Florida came to appear as islands on significant maps of North America that were made and circulated for well over a century begins when Thomas Nairne, first Indian agent of British South Carolina, participated in the British practice of leading Yamasee allies on raiding parties to Florida to capture indigenous people to sell at Charleston as slaves.¹⁴ In 1702 Nairne and a party of thirty-three Yamasee took thirty-five captives from the Florida interior, and afterward Nairne described the experience in a map and legend for others who might wish to “go a Slave Catching” in Florida. The map, though now lost, informed Nairne’s better-known 1708 map of the American Southeast that represents Florida in fragments so dramatically dispersed that they overlap the lower frame, as though the map could not quite contain them. The first extant map of Florida as islands, then, is Nairne’s Map of South Carolina Shewing the Settlements of the English, French, & Indian Nations from Charles Town to the River Missisipi (1708/1711; Figure 8).

Figure 8. Thomas Nairne, A Map of South Carolina Shewing the Settlements of the English, French, & Indian Nations from Charles Town to the River Missisipi (1708/1711). Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

What compelled Nairne to describe Florida as no other mapmaker had? Nairne probably never saw the portion of Florida that he depicts as islands, for records indicate that his 1702 raiding party went only as far south as the northern border of the Everglades.¹⁵ Yet a document accompanying Nairne’s map of 1708 furnishes a clue to his understanding of Florida in fragments. In the document—a memorial to Charles Spencer, Earl of Sunderland, on British imperial strategy in the Southeast—Nairne laments that frequent raids on the peninsula have driven Florida’s Indian population south “to the Islands of the Cape,” such that the Carolina Indians pursuing captives in Florida must now “goe down as farr on the point of Florida as the firm land will permit.”¹⁶ Since Nairne himself had not been farther south than the “firm land,” his information that “islands” lay below must have come from those who had: Carolina Indians, such as the Yamasee working with Nairne and other British colonial agents, or Florida Indians pursued or taken captive on the peninsula. Scholars have shown that it was not uncommon for American and European explorers to conduct “cartographic interviews” with Indians who knew the land more intimately, and one scholar of Nairne’s map of the Southeast speculates that while much of it is based on personal observation, Nairne may have also derived significant cartographic knowledge from Indian informants.¹⁷ He would not have been the only non-native observer to rely at least partly on Indians or other locally knowledgeable persons for geographic information about the southern reaches of Florida.

The northern edge of the Everglades is the point where many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century natural historians of Florida turned to locals for descriptions of the land to the south. Romans himself admits in his 1775 natural history that he had never explored “the far southern region of East Florida,” though he knew about it from “a dark account … which the savages give” of Lake Okeechobee and its surroundings.¹⁸ He also records that he gathered additional geographic information about this region from “a Spanish pilot and fisherman of good credit” who “had formerly been taken by the savages, and by them carried a prisoner, in a canoe” to their settlements on the banks of the lake.¹⁹ Similar admissions appear decades later in the wake of Florida’s annexation to the United States, in several texts that are part natural history of Florida and part promotional tract and settlers’ guide designed to draw North Americans to the nation’s newest acquisition.²⁰ In Notices of East Florida (1822) William Hayne Simmons relates that his knowledge of the southern region came from a fellow explorer’s interviews of “many Indians and Negroes” who had crossed south over Lake Okeechobee to a place so swampy that “there was no spot sufficiently elevated to form a dry encampment upon.”²¹ And in The Territory of Florida (1837) John Lee Williams acknowledges consulting “the descriptions of Indian inhabitants” when attempting to draw “the outline south of Tampa Bay” because “the interior of this part of the Territory is wholly unexplored by white men.”²² This long tradition of turning to locals for information about South Florida increases the likelihood that Nairne did so in 1708 when creating a map that displayed Florida as no extant map had done.

Nairne’s image of Florida immediately reached a wide audience because of the political significance of other portions of the map on which the image appeared. His map of the Southeast and accompanying memorial describing South Florida’s lack of “firm land” are together regarded as “one of the most remarkable documents in the history of Anglo-American frontier ‘imperialism,’” for these materials buttressed British claims to a part of North America held by the French, primarily by depicting British South Carolina as a territory extending west beyond the Mississippi River.²³ British observers eager to expand Great Britain’s holdings in North America quickly embraced Nairne’s map: its influence is readily apparent in London mapmaker Edward Crisp’s Compleat Description of the Province of Carolina in 3 Parts (London, 1711; Figure 9), which credits Nairne for the image of a fragmented Florida that appears twice on Crisp’s map as an inset in the upper left and lower right corners, respectively. Crisp’s map of 1711, bearing Nairne’s image of 1708, was one of the most important maps of the Southeast during this period: because of its detailed information about British settlements and the general character of the backcountry, it was especially valuable to those eager to expand British holdings in North America.²⁴

Figure 9. Edward Crisp, A Compleat Description of the Province of Carolina in 3 Parts (1711). Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

Since the British were not the only Europeans competing for land in North America, however, Crisp’s map exhibiting Nairne’s Florida almost definitely gained an eager audience beyond Great Britain as well. The map is the most likely source for the image of Florida appearing on Paris mapmaker Guillaume de l’Isle’s Carte de la Louisiane et du cours du Mississipi (1718; Figure 10), which quickly became one of the most widely circulated and highly influential maps of North America produced during the eighteenth century. De l’Isle, who is now hailed as the “founder of modern scientific cartography” for his efforts to rely on information gleaned from firsthand observation, clearly rejected the cartographic image of Florida most readily available to him, his father’s portrayal of Florida as a peninsula on Carte du Mexique et de la Floride (1703).²⁵ It is likely that de l’Isle would have sought a more recent description of Florida, and even more likely that he would have been interested in a map such as Crisp’s, which was widely praised for its wealth of detail.

Figure 10. Guillaume de l’Isle, Carte de la Louisiane et du cours du Mississipi … (1718; repr., 1733). HM 52353, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

The merit of de l’Isle’s map bearing the image of a fragmented Florida was immediately apparent to his contemporaries, and the map’s quality and political purpose made it an instant international success. It was particularly popular in France because it declared France’s victory over England in an ongoing “cartographical war” for southeastern territory by aiming to invalidate English claims, yet English audiences also admired the map for its authority and excellence.²⁶ In North America, too, the map gained a large viewership: it appeared in atlases until after the Revolution, and its influence extended into the nineteenth century, for Thomas Jefferson owned and consulted it while planning the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1803.²⁷ De l’Isle’s Carte de la Louisiane is also the source for subsequent maps of North America made all over the world, many of which were eagerly reprinted and consumed for several decades after their initial appearance.²⁸

De l’Isle’s 1718 map of North America ensured the nearly worldwide transmission of the image of a fantastically fragmented Florida for at least one hundred years, yet it did not do so alone. A list of eighteenth-century maps exhibiting Florida as islands includes Ion Baptista Homann’s Mississippi (1717?; Figure 11), Antonio Arredondo’s Descripcion Geografica (1742; Figure 12), John Gibson’s A Map of the New Governments, of East & West Florida (1763; Figure 13), Thomas Wright’s Map of Georgia and Florida (1763; Figure 14), and Isaak Tirion’s Algemeene Kaart van de Westindische Eilanden (1769; Figure 15). The number of newly published maps featuring this arrangement decreases after the late 1760s, when, as I discuss in Chapter 1, British cartographers sought to revise Florida from islands to peninsula in the wake of Great Britain’s 1763 acquisition of Florida from Spain. Yet long after this moment the tradition of representing Florida as islands persisted on maps published for the first time—such as Doolittle’s map of 1784—and on those that circulated as reprints or in manuscript.²⁹

A familiar account of this cartographic tradition—such as that provided by Romans and the writers of nineteenth-century natural histories and settlers’ guides to Florida—thus conceals a more accurate story that emerges from the maps themselves: information provided by indigenous peoples on the ground in Spanish colonial Florida during early eighteenth-century encounters between Indians and English gave rise to the cartographic tradition of Florida as islands that discernibly shaped significant maps of North America for well over a century. The tradition outlasted the moment when Florida began to solidify on some important British maps, and it persisted beyond the formative period when other parts of North America gained continental integrity and solidity during the mid-eighteenth century. In fact, Florida’s history as islands, and its endurance as such on several maps circulating during the early national period, suggest that many people of this period imagined the continent’s southern edge as fragmented and even indeterminate. A sampling of maps in the island tradition shows Florida in a multiplicity of arrangements of islands varying in number, size, shape, and location. When we view some of these maps alongside one another, as many early Americans could have done, the variety of island configurations emphasizes the difficulty of discerning Florida’s contours, and thereby of determining exactly what constitutes the ground and boundaries of North America (Figures 11-15).³⁰

Figure 11. Johann Baptist Homann, Amplissima regionis Mississipi seu Provinciae Ludovician (1717?), detail. HM 44194, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Figure 12. Antonio Arredondo, Descripcion Geografica (1742), detail. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

American Archipelago

Maps showing Florida as islands directly support a theory of North American geography that, though less well-remembered today, gained traction among many early Americans during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—namely, the theory that North America was naturally attached to the Caribbean and parts south via a chain of submerged mountains, the tops of which were, in the words of British geographer John Aikin, a “range of Islands extending from the southern point of east Florida to Guiana.”³¹ In his textbook, Geographical Delineations (1807), which was published in Philadelphia and well regarded in the United States, Aikin proceeds to explain that the islands “of this terraqueous region” are probably evidence that “at some remote period the ocean had made a violent incursion upon the North American continent, and had torn away a vast mass of land, leaving in an insular state all the elevated spots which were capable of resisting its fury.”³² The theory also captivated no less than Jedidiah Morse: one wonders whether Morse had in mind the islands of Florida that appear on Doolittle’s map in Morse’s Geography Made Easy (1784; see Figure 6) when in an 1805 edition of his work he reflects that “In the Bahama channel are many indications that the island of Cuba was once united to Florida.”³³

Figure 13. John Gibson, A Map of the New Governments, of East & West Florida (1763). HM 093:388 S, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

A fuller elaboration of this prospect comes from Charles Thomson, secretary to the Continental Congress: in an appendix to Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), Thomson more or less wonders why South Florida should be considered the edge of North America.³⁴ The thought occurs to him while reading Jefferson’s famous description of a landscape-altering phenomenon that ostensibly occurred in the distant past at the point where the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers meet and run through the Blue Ridge Mountains: “at this spot,” Jefferson muses, the two rivers, which had risen and “formed an ocean which filled the whole valley,” broke over and “[tore] the mountain down from its summit to its base.”³⁵ This “disrupture and avulsion,” as Jefferson describes it, directs Thomson’s mind farther south than Jefferson’s Virginia. “While ruminating on these subjects,” Thomson writes, “I have often been hurried away by fancy, and led to imagine that” the Gulf of Mexico was once a vast plain bordered on the east by “a range of mountains” running “from the point or cape of Florida … through Cuba, Hispaniola, Porto rico, Martinique, Guadaloupe, Barbadoes, and Trinidad, till it reached the coast of [South] America, and formed the shores which bounded the ocean, and guarded the country behind.” Yet “by some convulsion or shock of nature,” he continues, the Atlantic Ocean broke through this mountain range; the sea then “deluged that vast plain,” turning it into the Gulf of Mexico, before receding “through the gulph between Florida and Cuba, carrying with it the loom and sand it may have scooped from the country it had occupied…. But these are only the visions of fancy.”³⁶ Essentially, then, Thomson imagines that Florida’s tip is part of a mountain range that joins the continents.

Figure 14. Thomas Wright, A Map of Georgia and Florida (1763). Courtesy of Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library / University of Georgia Libraries.

Figure 15. Isaak Tirion, Algemeene Kaart van de Westindische Eilanden (1769), detail, in Thomas Salmon, Hedendaagsche historie, of tegenwoordige staat van Amerika …, 3 vols. (Amsterdam, 1766–69). HM 222554, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Scholars have speculated that North American geographic fantasies of Florida’s connection to the Caribbean and points south either voice imperial ambitions to annex Cuba and other parts of the West Indies, or express anxieties that the Caribbean was already too close and could “contaminate” U.S. bodies, culture, and politics.³⁷ Yet if we read such fantasies more literally, they express first and foremost uncertainties about where the boundaries of the nation actually are and even what constitutes a boundary and a continent—uncertainties that Florida inspires across a broad range of texts. When Thomson and other writers fancy an American archipelago consisting of North America, the Caribbean, and points south, then, they describe a spatial possibility in play on many maps that show Florida as islands. Tirion’s General Map of the West Indian Islands (1769; Figure 16), for example, centers on a chain of islands stretching from the tip of Florida, southeast through Cuba and Hispaniola, and nearly to the coast of South America. The map’s geographic schema resonates with Morse’s claim that Florida “was once united” to Cuba, and with Thomson’s observation that a submerged, “continuous range of mountains” joins Florida, the West Indies, and South America. Ultimately, then, the maps underscore an existing sense of the artificiality of setting North America’s southern edge at Florida, to which nature joins so many other places.

Reflections on Florida as islands strikingly remind us that a geographic understanding of North America as a sharply bounded, contiguous, self-contained landmass was not as universally embraced as we might imagine were we to focus exclusively on well-known political documents of the post-Revolutionary period that emphasize the importance of continental integrity and contiguity. For example, the Federalist project depended on solid, contiguous, self-contained ground, which would permit a “serialized” society: the goal was to organize communities all over the continent according to the same set of principles, so that people in all places, and with different and competing interests, could be managed and directed from afar.³⁸ Early federal land ordinances announce Federalism’s dependence on a specific set of geographic assumptions about the North American continent. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, for example, assumes that continental ground is universally fixed and integrated when requiring that the Northwest Territory be divided into five states, each composed of townships of six square miles that contain thirty-six one-mile-square sections to be auctioned to prospective settlers.³⁹ This requirement depends on the capacity of the entire continent to bear the sharp outlines of a permanent grid, without which the nation could not simultaneously cohere and expand. Indeed, proponents of the land system asserted that it would sustain federal authority over all prospective parts of the United States and thereby prevent the expanding country’s social and economic “disunion” and “disintegration.”⁴⁰

Figure 16. Isaak Tirion, Algemeene Kaart van de Westindische Eilanden (1769), in Thomas Salmon, Hedendaagsche historie, of tegenwoordige staat van Amerika …, 3 vols. (Amsterdam, 1766–69). HM 222554, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Federalism required not only a solid and integrated continent, but one that was insulated as well. In fact, many early Americans expressed their fervor for the continent by praising another landform: the island. Several political figures contended that the North American continent was actually a single island, a form that philosophers and artists had long considered ideally suited to the nation-state.⁴¹ Montesquieu, for example, had held that “the inhabitants of islands have a higher relish for liberty than those of the continent,” for “the sea separates them from great empires … and the islanders, being without the reach of [their enemies’] arms, more easily preserve their own laws.”⁴² Echoing this sentiment after the American Revolution, Alexander Hamilton expresses his affinity for the island in Federalist No. 8 when praising the perfect form of Great Britain because of its “insular situation,” which has “contributed to preserve the liberty which that country to this day enjoys.”⁴³ Hamilton continues: “if we are wise enough to preserve the Union we may for ages enjoy an advantage similar to that of an insulated situation … but if we should be disunited, and the integral parts should either remain separated or … be thrown together into two or three confederacies, we should be, in a short course of time, in the predicament of the continental powers of Europe.”⁴⁴ John Jay observes of England that “it seems obvious to common sense that the people of such an island should be but one nation,” and James Madison urges Americans to imagine the continent as a single island, and accordingly to embrace the opportunity of “deriving from our [geographic] situation the precious advantage which Great Britain has derived from hers.”⁴⁵ Compact, integrated, and self-contained, the continent-as-island is the ideal federal geographic form.

However, while the rhetoric of many of the period’s iconic political documents emphasizes the U.S. nation-state’s dependence on a solid, contiguous, and enclosed landmass, we know that some continental ground could not be geographically systematized. Certain peoples or polities demanded (or negotiated) spaces of autonomy, and certain environments such as desert regions and riverine zones thwarted expansionist design by preventing familiar versions of settlement, agriculture, and surveillance.⁴⁶ In reality, then, the evenly shaded map of the republic served as an abstraction that belied a “politically fragmented,” “legally differentiated” world “encased in irregular, porous, and sometimes undefined borders.”⁴⁷ Florida brought this reality into sharp relief by prompting many early Americans to observe and reflect on multiple—and sometimes competing—understandings of the nature and boundaries of continental ground.

But how might we document narratives of U.S. identity that emerged from recognition of the continent’s resistance to geographic systematizing? For, while maps and other descriptions of Florida as islands confirm early American awareness of the continent’s capacity to fragment and disperse, they tell us frustratingly little about how people interpreted this capacity during a period when “the solid reality, the terra firma” of the continent underpinned so many important conceptions of individual and national identity. For that interpretation, we must turn to early nineteenth-century narratives of real and imagined encounters with Florida’s elusive, shifting ground.

Mapping “The Florida Pirate”

John Howison’s “The Florida Pirate” (1821) was instantly beloved by its U.S. audience. After the tale’s initial appearance in Blackwood’s Magazine (August 1821), a large number of U.S. editions were published as independent volumes.⁴⁸ Given the popularity of the tale among North Americans and the timing of the tale’s publication just a month after Florida officially became U.S. ground, it seems natural to conclude that “The Florida Pirate” is about Florida, and that it answers American curiosity about the nation’s newest territorial acquisition, as did so many settlers’ guides to Florida published during the 1820s and 1830s.⁴⁹ Yet to most twenty-first-century readers, “The Florida Pirate” seems to have nothing to do with Florida. The story involves Manuel—a runaway slave turned pirate captain—and a white British narrator who meets Manuel in the Bahamas and begs to serve as surgeon aboard the Esperanza, Manuel’s pirate ship manned by a crew of escaped slaves seeking freedom on the seas. The plot follows the peregrinations of the pirates as they board and plunder ships in the Caribbean until a U.S. brig of war captures the Esperanza and takes the captain and crew to prison in Charleston, where Manuel dies by his own hand. No one in the story goes to Florida. The author never designates any character as “the Florida pirate.” In fact, the word “Florida” does not appear in the tale.

Nonetheless, generations of North American readers have identified Manuel as “the Florida Pirate.” An 1823 American reprint of the tale clearly designates him as such by placing a frontispiece image of Manuel labeled “MANUEL the PIRATE” across from the title page reading “The Florida Pirate” (Figure 17). And, perhaps building on the assumption of earlier audiences, a recent reader writes of “Manuel’s ‘Florida’ nativity”—even though in the story Manuel declares, “I was born in South Carolina.”⁵⁰

Figure 17. John Howison, The Florida Pirate; or, An Account of a Cruise in the Schooner Esperanza; with A Sketch of the Life of Her Commander (1823), frontispiece. Jay I. Kislak Collection, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress (125).

Figure 18. Approximate route of Manuel’s ship in “The Florida Pirate” (1821).

If nothing in the tale’s plot or Manuel’s biography explicitly connects Manuel to Florida, then why did early American readers seemingly have no qualms about identifying Manuel as “the Florida Pirate”? A geographic consideration of the story offers a likely answer. Based on information the narrator provides, we can easily map the Esperanza’s route (Figure 18). Beginning near the Bahamas—where Manuel and the white narrator meet—Manuel sails southwest toward Cuba, then southeast along Cuba’s northern shore to Xibara. Next, he sails far north into open sea where he and his crew board and plunder a British schooner stranded on a sandbar. Finally, Manuel returns to Cuba by sailing southwest to Matanzas, where a U.S. brig intercepts the Esperanza and transports the pirates north to Charleston, South Carolina, for sentencing. While Manuel never makes contact with the Florida today’s readers know, he moves across an expansive seascape that early readers easily imagined as the space of Florida during a time when its boundaries had yet to be determined.

It turns out that Manuel is “the Florida Pirate” for a reason that only becomes clear when we read the story in light of a spatial understanding of Florida as ground in flux. To those who understood Florida as a “terraqueous region” of islands, keys, and sandbars that change shape, size, and location depending on which geography textbook or map one consults, “The Florida Pirate” easily takes place in Florida. Furthermore, Manuel is “the Florida Pirate”—not by birth, but by belonging to the fragmented, shifting ground he masters.

Recognizing that “The Florida Pirate” is about Florida by virtue of its geography enables us to interpret the tale as its early readers may have—that is, as a narrative of belonging on the elusive landscape of the nation’s most recent territorial acquisition. In this way Howison’s text belongs to an expansive archive of early American reflections on inhabiting Florida. It suggests that, while much of Florida could not foster the feelings and practices of solidarity that post-Revolutionary proponents of the continental ideal prized, the region generated models of habitation, community, and economy sustained by mobility.

This message is particularly clear in Howison’s depiction of Manuel’s occupation as a Florida wrecker. Wreckers flourished along the Florida Reef during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by mastering ground where cargo ships frequently foundered. Essentially, wreckers were salvagers who profited by rescuing stranded vessels and crews in exchange for a substantial portion of the cargo to sell to the highest bidder in the domestic and foreign ports they frequented.⁵¹ Wreckers thrived, then, not only because of their intimate acquaintance with the intricacies of local terrain, but also because of their large network of associates, which often included escaped slaves, smugglers, Spanish fishermen, and independent adventurers—such as the white narrator of “The Florida Pirate” who supports himself by “forming a league with these outcasts of society.”⁵²