on the point of Florida as the firm land will permit.”16 Since Nairne himself had not been farther south than the “firm land,” his information that “islands” lay below must have come from those who had: Carolina Indians, such as the Yamasee working with Nairne and other British colonial agents, or Florida Indians pursued or taken captive on the peninsula. Scholars have shown that it was not uncommon for American and European explorers to conduct “cartographic interviews” with Indians who knew the land more intimately, and one scholar of Nairne’s map of the Southeast speculates that while much of it is based on personal observation, Nairne may have also derived significant cartographic knowledge from Indian informants.17 He would not have been the only non-native observer to rely at least partly on Indians or other locally knowledgeable persons for geographic information about the southern reaches of Florida.
The northern edge of the Everglades is the point where many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century natural historians of Florida turned to locals for descriptions of the land to the south. Romans himself admits in his 1775 natural history that he had never explored “the far southern region of East Florida,” though he knew about it from “a dark account … which the savages give” of Lake Okeechobee and its surroundings.18 He also records that he gathered additional geographic information about this region from “a Spanish pilot and fisherman of good credit” who “had formerly been taken by the savages, and by them carried a prisoner, in a canoe” to their settlements on the banks of the lake.19 Similar admissions appear decades later in the wake of Florida’s annexation to the United States, in several texts that are part natural history of Florida and part promotional tract and settlers’ guide designed to draw North Americans to the nation’s newest acquisition.20 In Notices of East Florida (1822) William Hayne Simmons relates that his knowledge of the southern region came from a fellow explorer’s interviews of “many Indians and Negroes” who had crossed south over Lake Okeechobee to a place so swampy that “there was no spot sufficiently elevated to form a dry encampment upon.”21 And in The Territory of Florida (1837) John Lee Williams acknowledges consulting “the descriptions of Indian inhabitants” when attempting to draw “the outline south of Tampa Bay” because “the interior of this part of the Territory is wholly unexplored by white men.”22 This long tradition of turning to locals for information about South Florida increases the likelihood that Nairne did so in 1708 when creating a map that displayed Florida as no extant map had done.
Nairne’s image of Florida immediately reached a wide audience because of the political significance of other portions of the map on which the image appeared. His map of the Southeast and accompanying memorial describing South Florida’s lack of “firm land” are together regarded as “one of the most remarkable documents in the history of Anglo-American frontier ‘imperialism,’” for these materials buttressed British claims to a part of North America held by the French, primarily by depicting British South Carolina as a territory extending west beyond the Mississippi River.23 British observers eager to expand Great Britain’s holdings in North America quickly embraced Nairne’s map: its influence is readily apparent in London mapmaker Edward Crisp’s Compleat Description of the Province of Carolina in 3 Parts (London, 1711; Figure 9), which credits Nairne for the image of a fragmented Florida that appears twice on Crisp’s map as an inset in the upper left and lower right corners, respectively. Crisp’s map of 1711, bearing Nairne’s image of 1708, was one of the most important maps of the Southeast during this period: because of its detailed information about British settlements and the general character of the backcountry, it was especially valuable to those eager to expand British holdings in North America.24
Figure 9. Edward Crisp, A Compleat Description of the Province of Carolina in 3 Parts (1711). Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.
Since the British were not the only Europeans competing for land in North America, however, Crisp’s map exhibiting Nairne’s Florida almost definitely gained an eager audience beyond Great Britain as well. The map is the most likely source for the image of Florida appearing on Paris mapmaker Guillaume de l’Isle’s Carte de la Louisiane et du cours du Mississipi (1718; Figure 10), which quickly became one of the most widely circulated and highly influential maps of North America produced during the eighteenth century. De l’Isle, who is now hailed as the “founder of modern scientific cartography” for his efforts to rely on information gleaned from firsthand observation, clearly rejected the cartographic image of Florida most readily available to him, his father’s portrayal of Florida as a peninsula on Carte du Mexique et de la Floride (1703).25 It is likely that de l’Isle would have sought a more recent description of Florida, and even more likely that he would have been interested in a map such as Crisp’s, which was widely praised for its wealth of detail.
Figure 10. Guillaume de l’Isle, Carte de la Louisiane et du cours du Mississipi … (1718; repr., 1733). HM 52353, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
The merit of de l’Isle’s map bearing the image of a fragmented Florida was immediately apparent to his contemporaries, and the map’s quality and political purpose made it an instant international success. It was particularly popular in France because it declared France’s victory over England in an ongoing “cartographical war” for southeastern territory by aiming to invalidate English claims, yet English audiences also admired the map for its authority and excellence.26 In North America, too, the map gained a large viewership: it appeared in atlases until after the Revolution, and its influence extended into the nineteenth century, for Thomas Jefferson owned and consulted it while planning the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1803.27 De l’Isle’s Carte de la Louisiane is also the source for subsequent maps of North America made all over the world, many of which were eagerly reprinted and consumed for several decades after their initial appearance.28
De l’Isle’s 1718 map of North America ensured the nearly worldwide transmission of the image of a fantastically fragmented Florida for at least one hundred years, yet it did not do so alone. A list of eighteenth-century maps exhibiting Florida as islands includes Ion Baptista Homann’s Mississippi (1717?; Figure 11), Antonio Arredondo’s Descripcion Geografica (1742; Figure 12), John Gibson’s A Map of the New Governments, of East & West Florida (1763; Figure 13), Thomas Wright’s Map of Georgia and Florida (1763; Figure 14), and Isaak Tirion’s Algemeene Kaart van de Westindische Eilanden (1769; Figure 15). The number of newly published maps featuring this arrangement decreases after the late 1760s, when, as I discuss in Chapter 1, British cartographers sought to revise Florida from islands to peninsula in the wake of Great Britain’s 1763 acquisition of Florida from Spain. Yet long after this moment the tradition of representing Florida as islands persisted on maps published for the first time—such as Doolittle’s map of 1784—and on those that circulated as reprints or in manuscript.29
A familiar account of this cartographic tradition—such as that provided by Romans and the writers of nineteenth-century natural histories and settlers’ guides to Florida—thus conceals a more accurate story that emerges from the maps themselves: information provided by indigenous peoples on the ground in Spanish colonial Florida during early eighteenth-century encounters between Indians and English gave rise to the cartographic
