Defining Florida: Geographic Knowledge and the Implantation of a Settler Society, 1763–83

The British pinned their greatest hopes for recolonizing America after 1763 on Florida--the place that had spent two centuries under Spain and that they knew the least about--dividing this region that had long kindled European desires for tropical wealth into two new colonies.  European cartographers picturing Florida alternated between two categories:  it was at once the southernmost extension of the continental mainland and a cluster of islands that seemed to crumble into the Caribbean Sea.  As the Army occupied posts in Mobile and Pensacola along Florida's strategic Gulf Coast, the Board of Trade sent Governor James Grant to St. Augustine with a mission to create a new plantation society out of the terra incognita of the peninsula.  Admiralty surveyor George Gauld and Surveyor General William De Brahm each spent more than a decade charting the contours of Florida's coastline in an attempt to define it as a place for British settlement.  Their expeditions converged on the Keys, a remote archipelago that Britain struggled to possess against the depredations of unregulated mahogany cutters and the claims of Spanish Cuba.  Mapping these marginal islands fixed them in British eyes as extensions of the mainland and charted new routes of navigation that connected the far-flung outposts in these colonies across treacherous waters.  As these surveyors generated the first rigorous cartographic record of the region, however, their maps also revealed geographic realities that conflicted with the Board's aspiration to demonstrate a new and enlightened model of colonization.  By the time the War for Independence fatally disrupted these British experiments in state-sponsored social creation, new versions of a provincial plantation society built on African slavery and aggressive land speculation were the only means by which any part of these vast provinces had been settled.