Liquid Landscape: Possession and Floridian Geography

Abstract

third volume of John James Audubon's Ornithological Biography (1835) includes painting of brown pelican perched upon mangrove in Florida Keys. While bird is Audubon's primary object of interest, he is also evidently fascinated by glossy and deep-coloured mangroves on which it nestles, for at end of his lengthy description of brown pelican is short section entitled The Mangrove (383). am at 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 figure of a tree reversed, and standing on its summit (386). Audubon asks us to imagine mangrove as an upside down tree, roots of which spread widely above ground while its trunk is submerged below. Unlike most trees, he means to say, mangroves grow low along earth's surface and have roots that take hold by spreading outward over ground rather than delving deeply into it. Such lateral roots present some unique spectacles. From shores of Florida, Audubon observes, the Mangroves extend towards sea, their hanging branches taking root wherever they come in contact with bottom (386). He even notices islands entirely formed of Mangroves, which raising their crooked and slender stems from bed of mud, continue to increase until their roots and pendent branches afford shelter to accumulating debris, when earth is gradually raised above surface of (386). As Audubon observes, mangrove trees that cover Florida's coasts prosper precisely because their roots construct their own solid foundations. As roots spread outward sand clings to them and it is not unusual for small islet to form where before there was only water. This is why mangrove tree is sometimes described as nature's way of converting water into (Blake 30l). Interestingly, 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 absence of secure material foundations. While early Anglo-American discussions of possession idealize terra firma, 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 variety of forms that founding and belonging could take. Florida's combination of geography and topography, which was singular among all of nation's actual and prospective possessions, secured its prolonged lack of political incorporation. But these exceptional qualities also made it testing ground for alternative models of taking root. In discourses of agriculture, natural history, and geography, language used to describe root taking in Florida countered many of claims about foundation and settlement that were developing elsewhere in new nation, finally putting productive pressure on philosophical bases of emerging model of agrarian republicanism itself. in Florida has been called land for good reason. (1) Many early Americans were fascinated by variety of singular ways in which and water combine in and around peninsula because of excessive rainfall, frequent hurricanes, and vast swamps that extend across seemingly interminable flatness saturated with standing water. phenomenon of erosion is particularly remarkable in Florida because it happens on three sides. Some early visitors even speculated that peninsula constantly dissolved, and that Florida Keys were mere marks and traces of an original shoreline lost long ago to sea (De Brahm, Report 240). To stand on Floridian ground is to experience precarious footing: as naturalist William Bartram notes, because Florida's unique geological base is permeable limestone reservoir that routes water along innumerable subterranean avenues, even where seems solid it is thick with liquid running incessantly through concealed hydrological networks just beneath surface (192-93, 226). …