economic “disunion” and “disintegration.”40
Figure 16. Isaak Tirion, Algemeene Kaart van de Westindische Eilanden (1769), in Thomas Salmon, Hedendaagsche historie, of tegenwoordige staat van Amerika …, 3 vols. (Amsterdam, 1766–69). HM 222554, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Federalism required not only a solid and integrated continent, but one that was insulated as well. In fact, many early Americans expressed their fervor for the continent by praising another landform: the island. Several political figures contended that the North American continent was actually a single island, a form that philosophers and artists had long considered ideally suited to the nation-state.41 Montesquieu, for example, had held that “the inhabitants of islands have a higher relish for liberty than those of the continent,” for “the sea separates them from great empires … and the islanders, being without the reach of [their enemies’] arms, more easily preserve their own laws.”42 Echoing this sentiment after the American Revolution, Alexander Hamilton expresses his affinity for the island in Federalist No. 8 when praising the perfect form of Great Britain because of its “insular situation,” which has “contributed to preserve the liberty which that country to this day enjoys.”43 Hamilton continues: “if we are wise enough to preserve the Union we may for ages enjoy an advantage similar to that of an insulated situation … but if we should be disunited, and the integral parts should either remain separated or … be thrown together into two or three confederacies, we should be, in a short course of time, in the predicament of the continental powers of Europe.”44 John Jay observes of England that “it seems obvious to common sense that the people of such an island should be but one nation,” and James Madison urges Americans to imagine the continent as a single island, and accordingly to embrace the opportunity of “deriving from our [geographic] situation the precious advantage which Great Britain has derived from hers.”45 Compact, integrated, and self-contained, the continent-as-island is the ideal federal geographic form.
However, while the rhetoric of many of the period’s iconic political documents emphasizes the U.S. nation-state’s dependence on a solid, contiguous, and enclosed landmass, we know that some continental ground could not be geographically systematized. Certain peoples or polities demanded (or negotiated) spaces of autonomy, and certain environments such as desert regions and riverine zones thwarted expansionist design by preventing familiar versions of settlement, agriculture, and surveillance.46 In reality, then, the evenly shaded map of the republic served as an abstraction that belied a “politically fragmented,” “legally differentiated” world “encased in irregular, porous, and sometimes undefined borders.”47 Florida brought this reality into sharp relief by prompting many early Americans to observe and reflect on multiple—and sometimes competing—understandings of the nature and boundaries of continental ground.
But how might we document narratives of U.S. identity that emerged from recognition of the continent’s resistance to geographic systematizing? For, while maps and other descriptions of Florida as islands confirm early American awareness of the continent’s capacity to fragment and disperse, they tell us frustratingly little about how people interpreted this capacity during a period when “the solid reality, the terra firma” of the continent underpinned so many important conceptions of individual and national identity. For that interpretation, we must turn to early nineteenth-century narratives of real and imagined encounters with Florida’s elusive, shifting ground.
Mapping “The Florida Pirate”
John Howison’s “The Florida Pirate” (1821) was instantly beloved by its U.S. audience. After the tale’s initial appearance in Blackwood’s Magazine (August 1821), a large number of U.S. editions were published as independent volumes.48 Given the popularity of the tale among North Americans and the timing of the tale’s publication just a month after Florida officially became U.S. ground, it seems natural to conclude that “The Florida Pirate” is about Florida, and that it answers American curiosity about the nation’s newest territorial acquisition, as did so many settlers’ guides to Florida published during the 1820s and 1830s.49 Yet to most twenty-first-century readers, “The Florida Pirate” seems to have nothing to do with Florida. The story involves Manuel—a runaway slave turned pirate captain—and a white British narrator who meets Manuel in the Bahamas and begs to serve as surgeon aboard the Esperanza, Manuel’s pirate ship manned by a crew of escaped slaves seeking freedom on the seas. The plot follows the peregrinations of the pirates as they board and plunder ships in the Caribbean until a U.S. brig of war captures the Esperanza and takes the captain and crew to prison in Charleston, where Manuel dies by his own hand. No one in the story goes to Florida. The author never designates any character as “the Florida pirate.” In fact, the word “Florida” does not appear in the tale.
Nonetheless, generations of North American readers have identified Manuel as “the Florida Pirate.” An 1823 American reprint of the tale clearly designates him as such by placing a frontispiece image of Manuel labeled “MANUEL the PIRATE” across from the title page reading “The Florida Pirate” (Figure 17). And, perhaps building on the assumption of earlier audiences, a recent reader writes of “Manuel’s ‘Florida’ nativity”—even though in the story Manuel declares, “I was born in South Carolina.”50
Figure 17. John Howison, The Florida Pirate; or, An Account of a Cruise in the Schooner Esperanza; with A Sketch of the Life of Her Commander (1823), frontispiece. Jay I. Kislak Collection, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress (125).
Figure 18. Approximate route of Manuel’s ship in “The Florida Pirate” (1821).
If nothing in the tale’s plot or Manuel’s biography explicitly connects Manuel to Florida, then why did early American readers seemingly have no qualms about identifying Manuel as “the Florida Pirate”? A geographic consideration of the story offers a likely answer. Based on information the narrator provides, we can easily map the Esperanza’s route (Figure 18). Beginning near the Bahamas—where Manuel and the white narrator meet—Manuel sails southwest toward Cuba, then southeast along Cuba’s northern shore to Xibara. Next, he sails far north into open sea where he and his crew board and plunder a British schooner stranded on a sandbar. Finally, Manuel returns to Cuba by sailing southwest to Matanzas, where a U.S. brig intercepts the Esperanza and transports the pirates north to Charleston, South Carolina, for sentencing. While Manuel never makes contact with the Florida today’s readers know, he moves across an expansive seascape that early readers easily imagined as the space of Florida during a time when its boundaries had yet to be determined.
It turns out that Manuel is “the Florida Pirate” for a reason that only becomes clear when we read the story in light of a spatial understanding of Florida as ground in flux. To those who understood Florida as a “terraqueous region” of islands, keys, and sandbars that change shape, size, and location depending on which geography textbook or map one consults, “The Florida Pirate” easily takes place in Florida. Furthermore, Manuel is “the Florida Pirate”—not by birth, but by belonging to the fragmented, shifting ground he masters.
Recognizing that “The Florida Pirate” is about Florida by virtue of its geography enables us to interpret the tale as its early readers may have—that is, as a narrative of belonging on the elusive landscape of the nation’s most recent territorial acquisition. In this way Howison’s text belongs to an expansive
