Liquid Landscape. Michele Currie Navakas
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