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 tradition of Florida as islands that discernibly shaped significant maps of North America for well over a century. The tradition outlasted the moment when Florida began to solidify on some important British maps, and it persisted beyond the formative period when other parts of North America gained continental integrity and solidity during the mid-eighteenth century. In fact, Florida’s history as islands, and its endurance as such on several maps circulating during the early national period, suggest that many people of this period imagined the continent’s southern edge as fragmented and even indeterminate. A sampling of maps in the island tradition shows Florida in a multiplicity of arrangements of islands varying in number, size, shape, and location. When we view some of these maps alongside one another, as many early Americans could have done, the variety of island configurations emphasizes the difficulty of discerning Florida’s contours, and thereby of determining exactly what constitutes the ground and boundaries of North America (Figures 11-15).30
Figure 11. Johann Baptist Homann, Amplissima regionis Mississipi seu Provinciae Ludovician (1717?), detail. HM 44194, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Figure 12. Antonio Arredondo, Descripcion Geografica (1742), detail. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.
American Archipelago
Maps showing Florida as islands directly support a theory of North American geography that, though less well-remembered today, gained traction among many early Americans during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—namely, the theory that North America was naturally attached to the Caribbean and parts south via a chain of submerged mountains, the tops of which were, in the words of British geographer John Aikin, a “range of Islands extending from the southern point of east Florida to Guiana.”31 In his textbook, Geographical Delineations (1807), which was published in Philadelphia and well regarded in the United States, Aikin proceeds to explain that the islands “of this terraqueous region” are probably evidence that “at some remote period the ocean had made a violent incursion upon the North American continent, and had torn away a vast mass of land, leaving in an insular state all the elevated spots which were capable of resisting its fury.”32 The theory also captivated no less than Jedidiah Morse: one wonders whether Morse had in mind the islands of Florida that appear on Doolittle’s map in Morse’s Geography Made Easy (1784; see Figure 6) when in an 1805 edition of his work he reflects that “In the Bahama channel are many indications that the island of Cuba was once united to Florida.”33
Figure 13. John Gibson, A Map of the New Governments, of East & West Florida (1763). HM 093:388 S, The Huntington