Liquid Landscape. Michele Currie Navakas

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Figure 5. William Gerard De Brahm, “The Ancient Tegesta, Now Promontory of East Florida (as it appears from its present Condition, many marks and traces what it with great probability can be ascertained to have been in former Ages …)” (1772). Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

      De Brahm’s title for Figure 5 partly explains the reason for the differences between the images: he calls Figure 5 The Ancient Tegesta, Now Promontory of East Florida (as it appears from its present Condition, many marks and traces what it with great probability can be ascertained to have been in former Ages…). Thus, whereas Figure 4 describes the land as it is, Figure 5 portrays it as it formerly existed.³³ In other words, using the remaining physical “marks and traces” of its former outline, De Brahm fills in the figure of the Florida “Tegesta,” using a name for the peninsula that he derives from the Tequesta, one of Florida’s many indigenous societies that the Spanish, along with internecine warfare, had largely decimated long before De Brahm’s arrival in Florida.³⁴

      Whatever the reason De Brahm provides for Florida’s substantially different appearances in each image, the effect of viewing both together is that mainland Florida appears to have dissolved; and the narrative accompanying the images reveals that this dissolution was ongoing at the time. For De Brahm explains that he considers coastal Florida evidence that “the Continent has been, and is to this day subject to yield its Limits foot by foot to the [Gulf] Stream.”³⁵ During three years in Florida, he explains, he and his assistants “have observed many Places, where fresh Encroachments [of ocean on land] appear to this Effect,” noting that trees growing in the water “between the Islands and the Main testify, that they lay on the Spot of the former Continent.” Indeed, while all North America dissolves, Florida dissolves so obviously that it offers “Testimonies, if not evident Proofs, that the [Gulf] Stream … does not give up any of its Acquisitions, or exchange old Possessions in lieu, as Seas, and Rivers are well known to do in all Parts of the known World.”³⁶ For although the surveying crew searched for places where the ground had expanded and “taken Possession of Limits deserted by the Stream,” none could be found. In fact, the Florida Keys, once contiguous with the mainland, now represent the mere outlines of its “probable Ancient figure,” which the sea continues to encroach upon, tearing the land “into so many Subdivisions” before one’s very eyes. In short, what we see when we look at Florida is not permanent land, but ground in a state of dissolution, bound to erode and leave behind only traces of its former shape.

      These observations on Florida set De Brahm apart from the typical surveyor because they suggest that he was interested not only in individual plots of land, but also in the larger whole to which they belonged.³⁷ His documentation of changing land within a survey was unusual enough that one fellow surveyor of Florida, Bernard Romans, looked unfavorably on The Atlantic Pilot: in the natural history of Florida that Romans published in New York in 1775, he declared that De Brahm’s work bore “marks of insanity.” Referring specifically to the images presented in Figures 4 and 5 above, Romans writes that “here we see an account of an unnatural change in the face of the country, which for many reasons never could have happened …; he turns one peninsula into broken islands, another into sunken rocks; … in this unmeaning chaos he joins and disjoins, turns water into land, and land into water.”³⁸ Yet a more likely reason for De Brahm’s interest in recording exchanges of water and land is that he was not only an experienced surveyor, but also a polymath whose many interests included geography, engineering, botany, astronomy, meteorology, hydrography, alchemy, and even mystical philosophy.³⁹ Educated and widely read, he was keenly interested in the natural world and a range of religious and scientific discourses, and his Report offers strong evidence that these interests directly informed his thinking about land.⁴⁰ Historians of geography have considered De Brahm more geographer than surveyor, and a careful reading of the Report reveals that De Brahm was also a “geotheorist”—the term historians now use to refer to the group of earth scientists who directly preceded the disciplinary rise of geology.

      Of all the ways of thinking about land that De Brahm could have drawn on in Florida, geotheory was most useful because of its commitment to explaining and predicting changes in the land. Unlike geologists, such as Georges Cuvier and Charles Lyell, who would correctly hypothesize that earth was radically unstable and unpredictable in its changes, geotheorists, such as Horace-Bénédict de Saussure and James Hutton, held that earth operated according to a set of predictable Newtonian mechanical laws.⁴¹ A brief comparison of De Brahm’s Report and Hutton’s “Theory of the Earth” (1788) suggests that De Brahm was geotheorizing in Florida. His perception of the Florida Keys as fragments outlining the peninsula’s “probable ancient Figure” accords with Hutton’s discovery that all discernible land exhibits “certain means to read the annals of a former earth.”⁴² Likewise, De Brahm’s observation that the Florida shore “yields its Limits foot by foot to the [Gulf] Stream” matches Hutton’s finding that “[all] land is perishing continually.”⁴³

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