Liquid Landscape. Michele Currie Navakas
Liquid Landscape
EARLY AMERICAN STUDIES
Series editors: Daniel K. Richter, Kathleen M. Brown, Max Cavitch, and David Waldstreicher
Exploring neglected aspects of our colonial, revolutionary, and early national history and culture, Early American Studies reinterprets familiar themes and events in fresh ways. Interdisciplinary in character, and with a special emphasis on the period from about 1600 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.
A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.
Liquid Landscape
Geography and Settlement at the Edge of Early America
Michele Currie Navakas
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2018 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Navakas, Michele Currie, author.
Title: Liquid landscape: geography and settlement at the edge of early America / Michele Currie Navakas.
Other titles: Early American studies.
Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, [2018] | Series: Early American studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017013303 | ISBN 9780812249569 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Landscapes—Political aspects—Florida—History—18th century. | Landscapes—Political aspects—Florida—History—19th century. | Land settlement—Florida—History—18th century. | Land settlement—Florida—History—19th century. | Florida—Description and travel—To 1865.
Classification: LCC F314 .N38 2018 | DDC 975.9/01—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017013303
For Gene Navakas
Contents
Introduction. Porous Foundations
Chapter 1. Liquid Landscape: Estuary, Marsh, Sink, Spring, Shore
William Gerard De Brahm on the Florida Shore
William Bartram’s Mobile Roots
Chapter 2. Island Nation: Shoal, Isle, Islet
The Origin and Endurance of Islands
Chapter 3. Wrecker Empire: Harbor, Rock, Reef, Key, Gulf
Reading the Reef: James Fenimore Cooper’s Florida
Gibraltar of the Gulf
Reef Passages to Empire
Chapter 4. Florida Marronage: Everglades, Swamp, Savannah, Hammock
Joshua Reed Giddings’s Maroon History of Florida
Swamp Salvage: Mary Godfrey and Elizabeth Emmons in the Everglades
Florida Maroon(er)s
Chapter 5. Florida Roots: Scrub-Palmetto and Orange
Serenoa repens
Harriet Beecher Stowe at Home in Mandarin
Floridian Domesticity
Liquid Landscape
Introduction. Porous Foundations
What does it mean to take root on unstable ground? Ground that shifts, seeps, expands, and erodes cannot sustain the familiar practices of settlement that British colonists brought to North America’s Eastern Seaboard in the early seventeenth century. Enclosure, demarcation, and improvement—in the form of fixed dwellings, sturdy fences, and cultivated fields—defined landed property according to John Locke and many Enlightenment philosophers. These practices also marked ownership in British colonial America, and later they enabled political participation in the United States. Yet these practices, which have historically signaled and secured belonging in much of North America, are difficult to imagine, let alone pursue, on shifting ground. For such ground cannot bear fixed markers of possession.1
People have taken root in Florida for thousands of years, despite the fact that Florida’s liquid landscape challenges crucial notions of land, space, and boundaries that underlie familiar British and Anglo-American forms and practices of founding. The Calusa, one of Florida’s many indigenous societies, established themselves on the shifting shoals of the southwest coast by way of wooden dwellings that floated above shell mounds when the waters inevitably rose. Florida wreckers, who salvaged distressed ships, made the Florida Reef their permanent home and source of income during much of the colonial and antebellum period by moving continually over coral terrain in small boats. Seminole Indians, who migrated south to Florida and there joined many Africans who escaped slavery during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, maintained communities on the spongy flatlands of the Everglades by constructing homes of thatched palmetto raised above the earth on poles made of cypress logs, and by planting crops on natural rises of dry ground known as hammocks. And the challenges of taking permanent hold on elusive,