an antiquated fiction by the time of the Revolution, the maps themselves offer a different account. They show that this tradition began on the ground in Florida during an early eighteenth-century colonial encounter between English and Indians, and that maps participating in this tradition persisted in print long beyond the mid-eighteenth-century moment when North America ostensibly began to gain continental integrity. Furthermore, a sampling of maps in the island tradition conveys the sense that North American ground is not only fragmented, but also indeterminate, for mapmakers used a variety of different and even conflicting island configurations when attempting to describe the shape of Florida.
The persistence of Florida as indeterminate space on Doolittle’s map and many others of the post-Revolutionary period reminds us that early modern maps frequently participate in multiple representational traditions. For many such maps are not only instruments of ideology, but also—and necessarily—the products of a host of interactions among professional cartographers, amateur mapmakers, and locals who provided information about the land in question.6 Thus, while most of Doolittle’s map endorses a popular ideology of the emerging nation-state, expressed through the figure of the continent, the Florida portion furthers another representational tradition that characterizes North American ground and boundaries quite differently.
The representational multiplicity of early national maps of North America depicting Florida as islands announces the contingent, provisional nature of U.S. geographic nationalism.7 For the islands of Florida attest that a nonnationalist spatial understanding of North American ground and boundaries persisted into the early national period, and even on some of the same maps that otherwise asserted North America’s continental status. During the same decades when the discourse of U.S. nation-building relied increasingly on North America’s contiguity and self-containment—qualities prized in a range of widely circulating post-Revolutionary documents such as The Federalist Papers and the Northwest Ordinance—North Americans also pondered Florida’s elusive island geography. And even though Florida was not officially U.S. ground until 1821, the islands of Florida encouraged some eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century observers to define the country as something other than a self-enclosed, ever-expanding nation of settlers that would cohere under a strong federal government. Ultimately, early reflections on the islands of Florida—in maps, settlers’ guides, and popular tales such as “The Florida Pirate” (1821)—offer scholars of the early national period a chance to look beyond the spatial abstraction of the continent, which promoted a definition of national identity that was not shared by everyone calling the United States home.8
The Origin and Endurance of Islands
In 1775 Bernard Romans, an Anglo-American surveyor, mapmaker, and naturalist, explained that the cartographic tradition of Florida as islands resulted from an interpretive error long since corrected. In A Concise Natural History of East and West Florida (1775), the first natural history of Florida published in North America, Romans attributes the error to a misunderstanding of central Florida’s Lake Okeechobee and the marshy flatlands surrounding it. “This lake,” he writes, “has given rise to the intersected, and mangled condition in which we see the peninsula exhibited in old maps.”9
Early Americans considered Romans an authority on Florida. His lavish two-volume natural history, featuring copperplate engravings by Paul Revere and financed by several prominent subscribers including John Adams and John Hancock, secured his election to the American Philosophical Society. In 1804 Charles Brockden Brown eagerly read the Natural History, writing that Florida’s imminent incorporation into the United States rendered the work “uncommonly interesting to the present, and still more to the next generation.”10 Subsequent natural historians of Florida read Romans with interest, drew on many of the sources that he cited, and repeated many of his claims, including his explanation of outdated maps featuring an “intersected, and mangled” South Florida. One writer confirms in 1823 that the “immense body of low land” constituting the peninsula’s marshy interior is to blame for the error that we see on “ancient maps”: by echoing Romans, yet altering “old maps” to “ancient maps,” this writer relegates the cartographic tradition of islands to an even more distant past.11 Such works indicate that by the time Romans wrote in the mid-1770s, people generally classified a nonpeninsular Florida with other fanciful fictions of Floridian ground, such as the Renaissance idea of Florida as a large island, or the Creek legend, related by William Bartram, that in Florida fugitive Yamasee occupy a part of the Okefenokee Swamp made of “enchanted land … [that] seem[s] to fly before [one], alternately appearing and disappearing.”12 It seems that, by the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Florida, like the rest of the continent, had traded an antiquated, erroneous reputation as “fragmented, elusive territory” for a new and correct one of physical integrity.13
Yet this conclusion fails to account for several facts, including the relatively recent, early eighteenth-century origin of the cartographic tradition of Florida as islands; the persistence of this tradition well beyond the mid-1770s; and the circumstances that actually produced the tradition in the first place. The very first map of Florida as islands appeared in 1708, and thus not at an obscure moment in the distant past, as the terms “old” and “ancient” suggest. And, as Amos Doolittle’s widely circulating map of North America published in 1784 (Figure 7) demonstrates, such maps persisted long after the moment when Romans declared them “old.” In fact, Doolittle’s map is one of at least seventeen maps of North America—of French, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, and English origins—first made between 1708 and 1799 that feature the islands of Florida, and some of these maps were consulted and reprinted long after 1799. Thus, for people in and beyond the United States throughout much of what we now call the early national period, the cartographic tradition of Florida as islands was not “old,” but rather vibrantly ongoing and of recent emergence. And its emergence was not the result of European or American encounters with Lake Okeechobee or the marshes of Florida’s interior; this explanation obscures the tradition’s actual origins in native knowledge that was transmitted to the British conducting Indian slave raids on the Florida peninsula during the first decade of the eighteenth century.
The story of how Florida came to appear as islands on significant maps of North America that were made and circulated for well over a century begins when Thomas Nairne, first Indian agent of British South Carolina, participated in the British practice of leading Yamasee allies on raiding parties to Florida to capture indigenous people to sell at Charleston as slaves.14 In 1702 Nairne and a party of thirty-three Yamasee took thirty-five captives from the Florida interior, and afterward Nairne described the experience in a map and legend for others who might wish to “go a Slave Catching” in Florida. The map, though now lost, informed Nairne’s better-known 1708 map of the American Southeast that represents Florida in fragments so dramatically dispersed that they overlap the lower frame, as though the map could not quite contain them. The first extant map of Florida as islands, then, is Nairne’s Map of South Carolina Shewing the Settlements of the English, French, & Indian Nations from Charles Town to the River Missisipi (1708/1711; Figure 8).
Figure 8. Thomas Nairne, A Map of South Carolina Shewing the Settlements of the English, French, & Indian Nations from Charles Town to the River Missisipi (1708/1711). Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.
What compelled Nairne to describe Florida as no other mapmaker had? Nairne probably never saw the portion of Florida that he depicts as islands, for records indicate that his 1702 raiding party went only as far south as the northern border of the Everglades.15 Yet a document accompanying Nairne’s map of 1708 furnishes a clue to his understanding of Florida in fragments. In the document—a memorial to Charles Spencer, Earl of Sunderland, on British imperial strategy in the Southeast—Nairne laments that frequent raids on the peninsula have
