Liquid Landscape. Michele Currie Navakas

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Liquid Landscape - Michele Currie Navakas


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      Liquid Landscape

      EARLY AMERICAN STUDIES

      Series editors: Daniel K. Richter, Kathleen M. Brown, Max Cavitch, and David Waldstreicher

      Exploring neglected aspects of our colonial, revolutionary, and early national history and culture, Early American Studies reinterprets familiar themes and events in fresh ways. Interdisciplinary in character, and with a special emphasis on the period from about 1600 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.

      A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

       Liquid Landscape

      Geography and Settlement at the Edge of Early America

      Michele Currie Navakas

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      UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

      PHILADELPHIA

      Copyright © 2018 University of Pennsylvania Press

      All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

      Published by

      University of Pennsylvania Press

      Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

       www.upenn.edu/pennpress

      Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Navakas, Michele Currie, author.

      Title: Liquid landscape: geography and settlement at the edge of early America / Michele Currie Navakas.

      Other titles: Early American studies.

      Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, [2018] | Series: Early American studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.

      Identifiers: LCCN 2017013303 | ISBN 9780812249569 (hardcover : alk. paper)

      Subjects: LCSH: Landscapes—Political aspects—Florida—History—18th century. | Landscapes—Political aspects—Florida—History—19th century. | Land settlement—Florida—History—18th century. | Land settlement—Florida—History—19th century. | Florida—Description and travel—To 1865.

      Classification: LCC F314 .N38 2018 | DDC 975.9/01—dc23

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017013303

      For Gene Navakas

       Contents

       Introduction. Porous Foundations

       Chapter 1. Liquid Landscape: Estuary, Marsh, Sink, Spring, Shore

       Uncultivable Outpost

       William Gerard De Brahm on the Florida Shore

       William Bartram’s Mobile Roots

       Chapter 2. Island Nation: Shoal, Isle, Islet

       The Origin and Endurance of Islands

       American Archipelago

       Mapping “The Florida Pirate”

       Chapter 3. Wrecker Empire: Harbor, Rock, Reef, Key, Gulf

       Reading the Reef: James Fenimore Cooper’s Florida

       Gibraltar of the Gulf

       Reef Passages to Empire

       Chapter 4. Florida Marronage: Everglades, Swamp, Savannah, Hammock

       Joshua Reed Giddings’s Maroon History of Florida

       Swamp Salvage: Mary Godfrey and Elizabeth Emmons in the Everglades

       Florida Maroon(er)s

       Chapter 5. Florida Roots: Scrub-Palmetto and Orange

       Serenoa repens

       Harriet Beecher Stowe at Home in Mandarin

       Floridian Domesticity

       Coda

       Notes

       Bibliography

       Index

       Acknowledgments

      Liquid Landscape

      Introduction. Porous Foundations

      What does it mean to take root on unstable ground? Ground that shifts, seeps, expands, and erodes cannot sustain the familiar practices of settlement that British colonists brought to North America’s Eastern Seaboard in the early seventeenth century. Enclosure, demarcation, and improvement—in the form of fixed dwellings, sturdy fences, and cultivated fields—defined landed property according to John Locke and many Enlightenment philosophers. These practices also marked ownership in British colonial America, and later they enabled political participation in the United States. Yet these practices, which have historically signaled and secured belonging in much of North America, are difficult to imagine, let alone pursue, on shifting ground. For such ground cannot bear fixed markers of possession.1

      People have taken root in Florida for thousands of years, despite the fact that Florida’s liquid landscape challenges crucial notions of land, space, and boundaries that underlie familiar British and Anglo-American forms and practices of founding. The Calusa, one of Florida’s many indigenous societies, established themselves on the shifting shoals of the southwest coast by way of wooden dwellings that floated above shell mounds when the waters inevitably rose. Florida wreckers, who salvaged distressed ships, made the Florida Reef their permanent home and source of income during much of the colonial and antebellum period by moving continually over coral terrain in small boats. Seminole Indians, who migrated south to Florida and there joined many Africans who escaped slavery during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, maintained communities on the spongy flatlands of the Everglades by constructing homes of thatched palmetto raised above the earth on poles made of cypress logs, and by planting crops on natural rises of dry ground known as hammocks. And the challenges of taking permanent hold on elusive,


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