largely conform to a “uniformitarian” view of earth’s changes. The well-known debate between theorists of “uniformitarianism,” who asserted that earth’s changes were uniform, and those of “catastrophism,” who argued that changes were sudden, crystallized in the publication of the final volume of Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1832), which supported a uniformitarian view.44 However the debate began with the geotheorists long before the rise of geology. In fact, Lyell’s belief that the earth was a “steady-state system” recalls aspects of Hutton’s earlier contention that all land not only “[perishes] continually” but also revives proportionally, with the overall amount of land on the planet remaining the same.45 In general, De Brahm believes with Hutton in both erosion and the “existence of … productive causes, which are now laying the foundation of land … which will, in time, give birth to future continents.”46 Florida, however, proves an exception to this rule; for De Brahm asserts that the peninsula’s ever-eroding shores illustrate that the Gulf Stream “does not give up any of its Acquisitions, or exchange old Possessions in lieu, as Seas, and Rivers are known to do in all Parts of the known World.”47 While geotheory offered the most useful language for describing Florida, even this science could not entirely account for a place where the sea fails to replenish what it continually wears away.
De Brahm’s commitment to recording Florida’s dissolution derives from his interest in geotheoretical speculation, yet it nonetheless appears antithetical to his explicit intention to attract investors and emigrants, a project that relied on portraying the ground as static, as historians of geography and property have shown. De Brahm was commissioned to produce both a largescale survey of Florida and several smaller-scale “plats,” documents containing a sketch and verbal description of an individual plot of ground. By and large, eighteenth-century land surveys aimed to stabilize the land record and thereby enable people to imagine themselves and their communities as firmly emplaced within national or imperial territory. And the plat served a particularly important role in this process: as Brückner explains, it was intended to facilitate an individual proprietor’s “strong sense of personal geodetic emplacement.”48 The plat conventionally fostered this sense by representing land as immovable and personalizing the representation with an inscription of the proprietor’s family name. In fact, the plat was an important discourse through which North Americans affirmed their ownership of “a particular locus in space and time”; a genre that became surprisingly popular in the eighteenth century in both Great Britain and North America, the plat placed individuals “inside a land- and map-based economy,” and thereby fostered a Lockean version of “modern autonomous existence.”49
As an experienced surveyor, De Brahm knew the conventions and objectives of surveys and plats. Furthermore, there is no reason to question his stated intention to attract settlers to Florida. Referring to an area he depicts at the right of Figures 4 and 5, De Brahm reports sincerely that “Settlers especially at Cape Florida will be much better off than all others on any Place I know upon the Eastern Coast of America.”50 Yet how is it possible that, in one description of Cape Florida, he suggests the entire cape dissolves, while in another he labels a plot of ground with a prospective settler’s family name?
De Brahm’s turn to geotheory within a survey ultimately suggests that Florida’s dramatic dissolution did not suggest to him what it suggested to the author of American Husbandry and many other observers who declared colonial Florida inimical to British settlers. Rather than interpreting Florida as the doomed periphery of empire, De Brahm considers it an occasion to seek a new language to describe shifting ground as land and even as property. In other words, his commitments to surveying and geotheorizing were not antithetical; rather, geotheory gave De Brahm a much-needed vocabulary for portraying the liquid landscape in a genre committed to fostering a sense of “self-assertion” and “autonomous existence” in the service of possession, settlement, and imperial expansion. For De Brahm grasped that land is more constantly changeable than it appears, and he found Florida an especially obvious conceptual challenge to discourses that assumed land’s stability. But by surveying obviously unstable ground, he indicated that land’s instability did not have to compromise one’s personal and permanent attachment to it. By furnishing a way to imagine the liquid landscape as property, his work resonates strikingly with another discourse in which possession did not require stability.
In riparian law, shifting, seeping, and eroding land had shaped the terms of possession since the Middle Ages. Just as the emergent discourse of geology did, this area of property law recognized that not all ground is made of the “sound good loam” and “proper soil” that American Husbandry overtly—and the founders implicitly—deemed land.51 Additionally, riparian law demonstrated that there was a way to possess watery ground, although such ground demanded a different language and ideal of possession than did the terra firma of the founders.
Sir Matthew Hale’s De Jure Maris (written in 1670 and published in 1787) and Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–69) identify and discuss a variety of “incidentals,” such as adjacent water and shores, that cannot be subject to the same laws of ownership that govern solid ground. In the language with which both legal theorists discuss shifting coastal lands in particular, instability alters the nature of proprietorship but does not prevent possession. For example, according to Blackstone, when the sea “make[s] terra firma”—that is, when the sea recedes so that the land increases—the individual riparian proprietor quite frequently gains whatever land the sea leaves behind.52 On the other hand, as Hale explains, “If a subject hath land adjoining the sea, and the violence of the sea swallow it up,” then the riparian proprietor does not suffer a total loss: particularly if he can show “reasonable marks” of where the land once was, then his full rights to the original space remain, and he may even regain it from the sea through ditching and draining if possible.53 Blackstone’s and Hale’s reflections on riparian rights suggest that instability does not prevent possession, but merely changes the nature of it. For a proprietor who is aware that his lands may change as the waters increase or recede need not necessarily lose his livelihood thereby, as long as he is prepared to adapt to this eventuality. While, unlike De Brahm, theorists of riparian law assume that land both erodes and expands, the underlying logic is strikingly similar: in both cases, the recognition of land’s impermanence does not compromise possession, although it may introduce new possibilities for and models of proprietorship.
Considered broadly, De Brahm’s riparian and geotheoretically inflected reflections on Florida in the Report signal the limits of familiar political and philosophical discussions that did not recognize inherently unstable ground as land. They suggest that imagining how to stake claim to North American ground requires departing from these discussions, and in this way they differ significantly from those of many of De Brahm’s contemporaries who, as we have seen, either explicitly or implicitly positioned Florida as resistant or threatening to settler colonialism on the basis of its instability. For by accommodating the liquid landscape with a language that could enable his readers to envision it as land and property, De Brahm offered a way to perceive Florida as part of North America. The Report attests that Florida prompted De Brahm to make mobility central to the survey, and thus to expand the very notion of what counted as “land”—that is, as ground that could stabilize and thereby count as politically significant.
De Brahm’s survey signals that the material realities of Florida would prompt people to revise traditional thinking about how to achieve permanent possession, and about what kinds of land are acceptable bases of a polity dependent on such possession. Finally, however, it provokes questions that it does not entirely answer. For what would possession in the absence of stability actually look like? What new relation to land would it require of a proprietor? And how might these changes to the concept of landholding change the imagination of settlement and the pursuit of expansion on the continent? For fuller accounts of Florida roots and some of their larger prospects, we may turn to the work
