Liquid Landscape. Michele Currie Navakas
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with interest, drew on many of the sources that he cited, and repeated many of his claims, including his explanation of outdated maps featuring an “intersected, and mangled” South Florida.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