Liquid Landscape. Michele Currie Navakas

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СКАЧАТЬ places on the continent at the moment of the founding of the United States, and thus that these seeming peripheries of early America should matter more centrally to our own scholarly understanding of early U.S. literature and culture.⁶

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      The Florida known to North Americans at the time of the nation’s founding had already challenged European and American thinking about the very nature of land, boundaries, and foundations for centuries. From the first Spanish landing on its shores in the sixteenth century, Florida’s topographic, geographic, and demographic indeterminacy shaped maps, travel accounts, surveys, and other texts. Ponce de León, who landed near present-day St. Augustine and claimed “La Florida” for Spain in 1513, recorded his discovery of the “island” of Florida, while immediately subsequent explorers affirmed Florida’s attachment to the continent. These conflicting geographic descriptions confused European mapmakers: some chose to map Florida as an island, and others as a peninsula.

      By about 1520 some of the initial geographic uncertainty about Florida’s location and contours gave way. But just as more maps began featuring Florida as a peninsula rather than an island, another spatial discrepancy emerged. Spain began to apply the name “La Florida” to an area that stretched far beyond the peninsula to include much of the present-day southeastern United States. Thus, alongside maps of Florida as an island and maps of Florida as a peninsula, maps locating “La Florida” along the entire south-eastern portion of the North American continent appeared. This designation for the region persisted among many European mapmakers and even American colonists for nearly two hundred years.⁷

      Complementing Florida’s early spatial fluctuation among island, peninsula, and continental Southeast is the mobility of its indigenous and nonnative populations. Reports penned by Spanish missionaries who founded Catholic missions during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries frequently characterize Florida’s variety of mostly nonagricultural Indian societies—including the Calusa, Guale, Tequesta, and Timucua—as “scattered” and nomadic. Such descriptions probably emerged from the difficulty of converting indigenous peoples who moved seasonally from place to place, and even lived offshore in fishing villages.⁸

      Indigenous populations, along with a variety of newcomers to Florida during this period, both contested and enabled Spanish rule, which lasted until 1763.⁹ Imperial rivals from France sought to establish a colony near present-day Jacksonville. Pirates of many nations attacked the Florida coast seasonally, sometimes capturing Spanish forts and seizing vessels.¹⁰ Some indigenous Indian groups helped sustain the Spanish mission system, but missionization was always a contested process, and by the early eighteenth century many converts began to flee, Indian revolts had challenged the authority of the missionaries, and Spanish-borne diseases ravaged the population.¹¹ Further challenges arose when Indians in other parts of the Southeast began coming to Florida. Yamasees and Lower Creeks, armed and sometimes led by the British, raided the peninsula for Indian captives to use and sell as slaves.¹²

      Yet not all populations drawn to Spanish Florida (1565–1763 and 1783–1821) contested colonial rule. Many became allies in exchange for freedom. African slaves, who began escaping to Florida from British colonies during the late seventeenth century, gained sanctuary and liberty in Florida upon conversion to Catholicism.¹³ And during Florida’s Second Spanish period, when civil war broke out among the Creek Nation of the Southeast during 1813, many of these Indians—today known as Seminole—began streaming southward onto the peninsula, where Spain recruited them to protect the colony from other Native groups and European imperial competitors. African and Creek migration to Florida would long outlast the end of Spanish rule in 1821, for Africans continued running south to freedom until the Civil War, and Creeks arrived in waves until the 1830s. By and large the two groups lived as allies, and the Seminole augmented their Florida chiefdoms by absorbing outsiders. They granted African newcomers protection in exchange for tribute, and welcomed some formerly missionized “Spanish Indians,” the U.S. name for Florida’s indigenous populations who had been almost entirely decimated by warfare and disease by the mid-eighteenth century.¹⁴

      Early encounters and alliances among various populations in Spanish Florida produced new cartographic understandings of the region on European and American maps. During the early eighteenth century many of these maps began to represent Florida as multiple islands. The islands of Florida likely originated when slave raiders from the British colonies solicited topographic information about the Everglades from local Indians who may have described the southern part of Florida as a flat expanse of water studded with innumerable rises of dry land.¹⁵ A cartographic conception of Florida as islands persisted on some of the most popular maps of North America from the early eighteenth century until well into the nineteenth century, while other popular maps featured the region as a peninsula. These competing spatial representations of Florida influenced geographic conceptions of the whole continent, for on many maps of the continent the islands of Florida are scattered so widely that they blend with those of the Caribbean, making it difficult to tell where North America ends.

      An inaccurate sense of Florida’s location and terrestrial shape exacerbated the enormous challenges to colonial rule that Great Britain faced upon gaining Florida from Spain in 1763 at the end of the Seven Years’ War.¹⁶ The British Board of Trade quickly launched a massive cartographic project to survey and map the peninsula, reef, and keys. This project was the first step toward defending Florida from imperial and Native rivals and enticing British settlers who would render the region a southern extension of Great Britain’s continental empire. The British divided Florida into two provinces: West Florida included the panhandle and adjacent parts of present-day Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana; East Florida consisted of the entire peninsula stretching south of the Georgia border.

      British planters from the Carolinas came to East Florida enticed by generous land grants, and soon “Florida fever” spread through New England, producing new maps, surveys, and natural histories, such as Bernard Romans’s lavishly illustrated Concise Natural History of East and West Florida (1775).¹⁷ British plantations exploiting the work of slaves and indentured servants spread along the St. Johns River near Jacksonville, where agriculture flourished until the outbreak of the American Revolution.¹⁸ Briefly during the war this area became a stronghold for Loyalists who fled south from Charleston and Savannah along with their slaves. Yet as fighting disrupted plantation labor and slaves escaped to Seminole villages in the interior, British planters fled Florida for good.

      Many early U.S. political figures were intrigued by the prospect of including Florida within the new nation. From their point of view, U.S. control over the region would bolster the emerging nation’s claims to the continent by guaranteeing mastery of the Gulf of Mexico and adjoining commercial waterways such as the Mississippi River.¹⁹ For this reason John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and James Madison urged claims to the Floridas from the moment independence was declared. Soon these and other U.S. observers had additional cause to do so: upon the war’s conclusion in 1783, Great Britain retroceded the Floridas to Spain, which immediately revived its sanctuary policy, drawing to the Floridas an ever larger number of slaves from plantations across the U.S. South.²⁰

      For a newly emergent, slave-holding nation with expansionist designs on the continent, Spanish Florida was an unavoidable topic of concern and debate. The unstable borderland harbored populations both black and white from across and beyond the country, and many of these groups were averse, or even hostile, to the prospect of U.S. rule.²¹ After the American Revolution Spain opened a generous land grant policy to foreign and non-Catholic immigrants, encouraging planters with their slaves and servants from all over the Caribbean and North America to settle in Spanish Florida alongside Cuban planters and homesteaders.²² And although in 1790 Spain yielded to U.S. pressures to rescind the sanctuary policy, Africans and Creeks continued migrating to Seminole country. The savannahs and swamps of the Florida interior would remain a stronghold of black freedom for many decades to come.²³

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