Liquid Landscape: Possession and Floridian Geography

The third volume of John James Audubon's Ornithological Biography (1835) includes a painting of the brown pelican perched upon a mangrove in the Florida Keys. While the bird is Audubon's primary object of interest, he is also evidently fascinated by the "glossy and deep-coloured mangroves on which it nestles," for at the end of his lengthy description of the brown pelican is a short section entitled "The Mangrove" (383). "I am at a loss for an object with which to compare these trees, in order to afford you an idea of them," Audubon writes, but he settles on the figure of "a tree reversed, and standing on its summit" (386). Audubon asks us to imagine the mangrove as an upside down tree, the roots of which spread widely above ground while its trunk is submerged below. Unlike most trees, he means to say, mangroves grow low along the earth's surface and have roots that take hold by spreading outward over the ground rather than delving deeply into it. Such lateral roots present some unique spectacles. From the shores of Florida, Audubon observes, "the Mangroves extend towards the sea, their hanging branches taking root wherever they come in contact with the bottom" (386). He even notices islands "entirely formed of Mangroves, which raising their crooked and slender stems from a bed of mud, continue to increase until their roots and pendent branches afford shelter to accumulating debris, when the earth is gradually raised above the surface of the water" (386). As Audubon observes, the mangrove trees that cover Florida's coasts prosper precisely because their roots construct their own solid foundations. As the roots spread outward sand clings to them and it is not unusual for a small islet to form where before there was only water. This is why the mangrove tree is sometimes described as "nature's way" of converting water into land (Blake 301). Interestingly, the mangrove cannot take root in dry and stable earth; its shallow, lateral roots require wet and unstable ground in order to establish themselves.

I begin with Audubon's mangrove because his observations on it suggest that roots can be successfully pursued in the absence of secure material foundations. While early Anglo-American discussions of possession idealize terra firma, the message of "The Mangrove" is that possession does not require stable ground. Here and in other early writing on Florida, mangrove trees are only one of many unique features that provide useful metaphors for considering the variety of forms that founding and belonging could take. Florida's combination of geography and topography, which was singular among all of the nation's actual and prospective possessions, secured its prolonged lack of political incorporation. But these exceptional qualities also made it the testing ground for alternative models of taking root. In the discourses of agriculture, natural history, and geography, the language used to describe root taking in Florida countered many of the claims about foundation and settlement that were developing elsewhere in the new nation, finally putting productive pressure on the philosophical bases of the emerging model of agrarian republicanism itself.

The land in Florida has been called "liquid land" for good reason.¹ Many early Americans were fascinated by the variety of singular ways in which land and water combine in and around the peninsula because of excessive rainfall, frequent hurricanes, and vast swamps that extend across a seemingly interminable flatness saturated with standing water. The phenomenon of erosion is particularly remarkable in Florida because it happens on three sides. Some early visitors even speculated that the peninsula constantly dissolved, and that the Florida Keys were mere "marks and traces" of an original shoreline lost long ago to the sea (De Brahm, Report 240). To stand on Floridian ground is to experience precarious footing: as the naturalist William Bartram notes, because Florida's unique geological base is a permeable limestone reservoir that routes water along innumerable subterranean avenues, even where the land seems solid it is thick with liquid running incessantly through concealed hydrological networks just beneath the surface (192-93, 226). In its substructure and on...