The following chapter continues to chart the influence of Florida’s fluidity on broader narratives of North American settlement, this time by turning to another set of materials: eighteenth-century European and American maps of Florida as islands. Such maps enable us to place Florida’s topographic porosity in a broad geopolitical context, and to see that it disrupted a politically significant visual narrative of North America as a contiguous, self-enclosed, sharply defined landmass. By broadcasting Florida’s soluble, corrosive, hurricane-swept, porous, and fragmented ground, maps of Florida as islands provide us with one way to see beyond the more familiar cartographic discourse of continental integrity that would underpin U.S. nationalism by minimizing or erasing the spatial fluidity and demographic heterogeneity of the early United States.
Chapter 2
Island Nation: Shoal, Isle, Islet
Amos Doolittle’s Map of the United States of America (Figure 6), one of the first maps of North America to be published in the United States, first appeared in 1784 in geographer Jedidiah Morse’s popular textbook, Geography Made Easy, which Morse hoped would inspire young readers to “imbibe an acquaintance with their own country, and an attachment to its interests” during the immediate aftermath of the Revolutionary War.1 A staunch Federalist, Morse believed that “the United States, and indeed all parts of North-America, seem to have been formed by nature for the most intimate union.”2 Doolittle’s map visually underscores this early precursor of the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny by illustrating the emerging U.S. nation-state as a contiguous territory stretching from British Canada to Spanish Florida, and bordered sharply on the west and east by the Mississippi River and the Atlantic Ocean, respectively.
As recent scholarship on the history of cartography has shown, early modern maps frequently “produced” space: by making ideological claims about the areas they represented, rather than reflecting the actual state of geographic knowledge, maps influenced the development of national and imperial identities, boundaries, population patterns, and power relations.3 Doolittle’s map is no exception, for it contributes to a widespread phenomenon in which North Americans of the Revolutionary period proclaimed North America’s “continental status” in a range of texts—including maps, geographies, decorative arts, portraits, classic works of literature, and key political essays and legal documents—as a way of declaring the new country’s independence, sovereignty, and destiny to become a culturally homogeneous nation united under one government.4 The figure of the continent continued to serve a range of nationalist purposes long after the Revolution, a fact prompting literary scholar Myra Jehlen’s memorable claim that “the solid reality, the terra firma” of the continent was “the decisive factor shaping the founding conceptions of ‘America’ and ‘the American’” from the early national period until the mid-nineteenth century.5
Figure 6. Amos Doolittle, A Map of the United States of America (1784). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Figure 7. Amos Doolittle, A Map of the United States of America (1784), detail. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Considering the continent’s ideological significance during the early national period, it seems surprising upon first consideration that Doolittle’s map does not entirely sustain Morse’s claim that “all parts of North-America” encourage “attachment” and “union”: one prominent part of the map does not describe a solid, contiguous, and self-contained landmass. Morse’s claim falters at the lower right corner of the map, where Florida appears dramatically fragmented into islands that constitute a ragged, fractured southeastern edge of North America (Figure 7). The land is indented by vast harbors and gulfs, broken into five or six large landmasses, and scattered in chains of almost innumerable islets that extend into the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic, almost as though a gigantic wave had swept over the land and left it in shards. Doolittle’s depiction of Florida as islands was not unusual. It conforms to a cartographic convention through which many American and European mapmakers described Florida before, during, and long after the American Revolution.
While a familiar account of the cartographic tradition of Florida as islands suggests that this tradition was 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,