Both coastally and inland, Florida fluctuated as no other part of the continent. This fact was advertised with particular force during the nineteenth century by repeated failures of efforts to survey, drain, and enclose the Everglades, which mostly remained “a distant wilderness” to those living in other parts of the United States.23 And settlers’ guides to antebellum Florida attest that its status as an elusive borderland with a debatable connection to the continent persisted long after the British Board of Trade sought to revise this impression during the 1760s. One especially popular guide to Territorial Florida declares the nation’s recent addition a “curiously shaped and curiously formed terminal appendage to the great United States,” and includes questions that cannot but raise doubt about Florida’s contiguity and connection: are the Keys “fragments of the continent, torn by the abrasion of the tide,” or are they “additions, constantly increased” by the growth of coral reefs? Have the Everglades “recently risen from the ocean? Is the land still rising?”24 Thus, even as the writers of such guides sought to draw prospective settlers to Florida, they questioned its capacity to sustain settlement because they could not help speculating that the region was formed by unique processes and materials other than unvarying, solid, divisible ground.
These and other texts attest that, to many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century observers, Florida never quite shed its status as an elusive, underdeveloped borderland. In this way such texts establish that people frequently responded to Florida in much the same way that they responded to other southern spaces as unfortunate exceptions to the culture developing on the rest of the continent. Yet such texts also reveal that, in the case of Florida, this familiar mode of response was largely conditioned by the fact that people lacked a language for describing and imagining radically shifting ground as an integral part of North America. For familiar Anglophone philosophical discourses of landed possession offered no vocabulary for thinking through the incorporation of ground that shifts, seeps, expands, and erodes.25 Put otherwise, salient rhetorical, geographical, and historical conceptions of empires and nations as reliant on unvarying, solid, divisible ground provided a context within which Florida’s porosity and liquidity signaled its tenuous connection to or total exclusion from North America.
And yet, to many people, Florida’s liquid landscape meant something else. During a time when dominant discussions of settlement, private property, cultivation, political economy, and even swampland redemption afforded no way to describe Florida as land or property, some eighteenth-century observers did both. Though it required a conceptual leap, William Gerard De Brahm, first surveyor of British colonial Florida, devised a land survey that accommodates shifting, seeping, “changeable” ground. His surveys reveal that the same particularities of Floridian ground that resisted familiar practices of Anglo-American settlement and habitation also generated new ways to take root. De Brahm’s Florida surveys provided British and U.S. observers one way to envision Florida as an extension of North America. And just as importantly they also provide scholars one set of materials through which to perceive early American interest in a version of landed possession that did not descend entirely from a philosophical genealogy inherited through Locke and Hume.
William Gerard De Brahm on the Florida Shore
In 1764, during the year following Great Britain’s acquisition of Florida from Spain, the British Board of Trade appointed De Brahm to the position of surveyor general of the Southern District of North America. As such he would administer the massive project of surveying and mapping all British holdings south of the Potomac, though the board prioritized Florida, and particularly the area from St. Augustine south to the tip of the peninsula.26 Accordingly De Brahm moved from Georgia to St. Augustine, and the following year he began surveying East Florida by following the board’s instructions to focus specifically on the coastlands they believed to have the most potential for settlement: those stretching along the eastern side of the peninsula from St. Augustine to Cape Florida at present-day Miami.27
De Brahm’s surveys were to guide the board’s decisions about precisely where “a loyal landowning citizenry” would thrive, though De Brahm was also personally invested in locating the most valuable lands. His position as surveyor general meant that British landholders could commission him privately for small-scale surveys of particular tracts they planned to develop.28 In fact, without such commissions, De Brahm would not have secured the patronage necessary to complete The Report of the General Survey, a detailed narrative in which he describes the character of Floridian ground.29
The Report, which De Brahm personally presented to King George III in manuscript form during 1773, proved valuable not only to the board but also to private parties, including members of the Cape Florida Society, a group of European investors who met informally in London to plan a colony along the Florida coast near present-day Miami.30 While the Report remained unpublished in its entirety until the twentieth century, a London publisher issued an excerpt of it in 1772 as an independent volume called The Atlantic Pilot. London reviewers hailed the work as a “small but elegant performance” and evidence of the author’s “fidelity, accuracy, and diligence” in carrying out his commission, and an American bookseller at Charleston quickly imported a supply of the Pilot.31 De Brahm’s detailed descriptions of the Florida coast and Atlantic Ocean currents proved particularly useful to several subsequent eighteenth- and nineteenth-century surveyors, many of whom employed the Pilot in their own publications. As The Journal of Andrew Ellicott (Philadelphia, 1803) attests, the well-known surveyor of the boundary line between the United States and the Spanish colonies of East and West Florida preferred De Brahm’s discussion of the Gulf Stream in the Pilot to Benjamin Franklin’s more widely known work on this topic.32 For our present purposes the Pilot indeed repays careful scrutiny, particularly with regard to two large foldout maps featuring South Florida and the Florida Keys: Chart of the South End of East Florida and Martiers (1772; Figure 4) and The Ancient Tegesta, Now Promontory of East Florida (1772; Figure 5). Funded by and produced for prospective settlers, these maps describe the same stretch of coast near Miami; yet upon first consideration they suggest that Florida as a whole could never sustain permanent settlement.
Figure 4. William Gerard De Brahm, “Chart of the South End of East Florida and Martiers” (1772). HM 121784, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Images of Florida in the published portions of the Report depict a place that collapses the absolute distinction between water and soil. A comparison of two images in particular reveals land in flux. Chart of the South End of East Florida and The Ancient Tegesta describe the swath of coastland and shoals that stretches from Cape Florida, just barely visible in the upper right corner, to the Dry Tortugas, visible in the lower left corner. Yet ground shaded in dark gray as submerged shoal or sandbank in Chart (Figure 4) is outlined as a firm part of the peninsula in Tegesta (Figure 5). We can see the clearest example of this change when we compare the Dry Tortugas, depicted at the bottom left corner of each image. The Tortugas of Figure 4 are tiny islets, west of Key West, just as they accurately appear on twenty-first-century maps of Florida; yet those of Figure 5 are substantial landmasses. The “Tortuga Shoal” of each document strikingly illustrates the alteration, for the chain of islets that resembles