Liquid Landscape. Michele Currie Navakas
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Figure 11. Johann Baptist Homann, Amplissima regionis Mississipi seu Provinciae Ludovician (1717?), detail. HM 44194, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Figure 12. Antonio Arredondo, Descripcion Geografica (1742), detail. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.
American Archipelago
Maps showing Florida as islands directly support a theory of North American geography that, though less well-remembered today, gained traction among many early Americans during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—namely, the theory that North America was naturally attached to the Caribbean and parts south via a chain of submerged mountains, the tops of which were, in the words of British geographer John Aikin, a “range of Islands extending from the southern point of east Florida to Guiana.”31 In his textbook, Geographical Delineations (1807), which was published in Philadelphia and well regarded in the United States, Aikin proceeds to explain that the islands “of this terraqueous region” are probably evidence that “at some remote period the ocean had made a violent incursion upon the North American continent, and had torn away a vast mass of land, leaving in an insular state all the elevated spots which were capable of resisting its fury.”32 The theory also captivated no less than Jedidiah Morse: one wonders whether Morse had in mind the islands of Florida that appear on Doolittle’s map in Morse’s Geography Made Easy (1784; see Figure 6) when in an 1805 edition of his work he reflects that “In the Bahama channel are many indications that the island of Cuba was once united to Florida.”33
Figure 13. John Gibson, A Map of the New Governments, of East & West Florida (1763). HM 093:388 S, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
A fuller elaboration of this prospect comes from Charles Thomson, secretary to the Continental Congress: in an appendix to Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), Thomson more or less wonders why South Florida should be considered the edge of North America.34 The thought occurs to him while reading Jefferson’s famous description of a landscape-altering phenomenon that ostensibly occurred in the distant past at the point where the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers meet and run through the Blue Ridge Mountains: “at this spot,” Jefferson muses, the two rivers, which had risen and “formed an ocean which filled the whole valley,” broke over and “[tore] the mountain down from its summit to its base.”35 This “disrupture and avulsion,” as Jefferson describes it, directs Thomson’s mind farther south than Jefferson’s Virginia. “While ruminating on these subjects,” Thomson writes, “I have often been hurried away by fancy, and led to imagine that” the Gulf of Mexico was once a vast plain bordered on the east by “a range of mountains” running “from the point or cape of Florida … through Cuba, Hispaniola, Porto rico, Martinique, Guadaloupe, Barbadoes, and Trinidad, till it reached the coast of [South] America, and formed the shores which bounded the ocean, and guarded the country behind.” Yet “by some convulsion or shock of nature,” he continues, the Atlantic Ocean broke through this mountain range; the sea then “deluged that vast plain,” turning it into the Gulf of Mexico, before receding “through the gulph between Florida and Cuba, carrying with it the loom and sand it may have scooped from the country it had occupied…. But these are only the visions of fancy.”36 Essentially, then, Thomson imagines that Florida’s tip is part of a mountain range that joins the continents.
Figure 14. Thomas Wright, A Map of Georgia and Florida (1763). Courtesy of Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library / University of Georgia Libraries.
Figure 15. Isaak Tirion, Algemeene Kaart van de Westindische Eilanden (1769), detail, in Thomas Salmon, Hedendaagsche historie, of tegenwoordige staat van Amerika …, 3 vols. (Amsterdam, 1766–69). HM 222554, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Scholars have speculated that North American geographic fantasies of Florida’s connection to the Caribbean and points south either voice imperial ambitions to annex Cuba and other parts of the West Indies, or express anxieties that the Caribbean was already too close and could “contaminate” U.S. bodies, culture, and politics.37 Yet if we read such fantasies more literally, they express first and foremost uncertainties about where the boundaries of the nation actually are and even what constitutes a boundary and a continent—uncertainties that Florida inspires across a broad range of texts. When Thomson and other writers fancy an American archipelago consisting of North America, the Caribbean, and points south, then, they describe a spatial possibility in play on many maps that show Florida as islands. Tirion’s General Map of the West Indian Islands (1769; Figure 16), for example, centers on a chain of islands stretching from the tip of Florida, southeast through Cuba and Hispaniola, and nearly to the coast of South America. The map’s geographic schema resonates with Morse’s claim that Florida “was once united” to Cuba, and with Thomson’s observation that a submerged, “continuous range of mountains” joins Florida, the West Indies, and South America. Ultimately, then, the maps underscore an existing sense of the artificiality of setting North America’s southern edge at Florida, to which nature joins so many other places.
Reflections on Florida as islands strikingly remind us that a geographic understanding of North America as a sharply bounded, contiguous, self-contained landmass was not as universally embraced as we might imagine were we to focus exclusively on well-known political documents of the post-Revolutionary period that emphasize the importance of continental integrity and contiguity. For example, the Federalist project depended on solid, contiguous, self-contained ground, which would permit a “serialized” society: the goal was to organize communities all over the continent according to the same set of principles, so that people in all places, and with different and competing interests, could be managed and directed from afar.38 Early federal land ordinances announce Federalism’s dependence on a specific set of geographic assumptions about the North American continent. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, for example, assumes that continental ground is universally fixed and integrated when requiring that the Northwest Territory be divided into five states, each composed of townships of six square miles that contain thirty-six one-mile-square sections to be auctioned to prospective settlers.39 This requirement depends on the capacity of the entire continent to bear the sharp outlines of a permanent grid, without which the nation could not simultaneously cohere