Liquid Landscape. Michele Currie Navakas

Mapping “The Florida Pirate”

      John Howison’s “The Florida Pirate” (1821) was instantly beloved by its U.S. audience. After the tale’s initial appearance in Blackwood’s Magazine (August 1821), a large number of U.S. editions were published as independent volumes.⁴⁸ Given the popularity of the tale among North Americans and the timing of the tale’s publication just a month after Florida officially became U.S. ground, it seems natural to conclude that “The Florida Pirate” is about Florida, and that it answers American curiosity about the nation’s newest territorial acquisition, as did so many settlers’ guides to Florida published during the 1820s and 1830s.⁴⁹ Yet to most twenty-first-century readers, “The Florida Pirate” seems to have nothing to do with Florida. The story involves Manuel—a runaway slave turned pirate captain—and a white British narrator who meets Manuel in the Bahamas and begs to serve as surgeon aboard the Esperanza, Manuel’s pirate ship manned by a crew of escaped slaves seeking freedom on the seas. The plot follows the peregrinations of the pirates as they board and plunder ships in the Caribbean until a U.S. brig of war captures the Esperanza and takes the captain and crew to prison in Charleston, where Manuel dies by his own hand. No one in the story goes to Florida. The author never designates any character as “the Florida pirate.” In fact, the word “Florida” does not appear in the tale.

      Nonetheless, generations of North American readers have identified Manuel as “the Florida Pirate.” An 1823 American reprint of the tale clearly designates him as such by placing a frontispiece image of Manuel labeled “MANUEL the PIRATE” across from the title page reading “The Florida Pirate” (Figure 17). And, perhaps building on the assumption of earlier audiences, a recent reader writes of “Manuel’s ‘Florida’ nativity”—even though in the story Manuel declares, “I was born in South Carolina.”⁵⁰

Figure 17. John Howison, The Florida Pirate; or, An Account of a Cruise in the Schooner Esperanza; with A Sketch of the Life of Her Commander (1823), frontispiece. Jay I. Kislak Collection, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress (125).

Figure 18. Approximate route of Manuel’s ship in “The Florida Pirate” (1821).

      If nothing in the tale’s plot or Manuel’s biography explicitly connects Manuel to Florida, then why did early American readers seemingly have no qualms about identifying Manuel as “the Florida Pirate”? A geographic consideration of the story offers a likely answer. Based on information the narrator provides, we can easily map the Esperanza’s route (Figure 18). Beginning near the Bahamas—where Manuel and the white narrator meet—Manuel sails southwest toward Cuba, then southeast along Cuba’s northern shore to Xibara. Next, he sails far north into open sea where he and his crew board and plunder a British schooner stranded on a sandbar. Finally, Manuel returns to Cuba by sailing southwest to Matanzas, where a U.S. brig intercepts the Esperanza and transports the pirates north to Charleston, South Carolina, for sentencing. While Manuel never makes contact with the Florida today’s readers know, he moves across an expansive seascape that early readers easily imagined as the space of Florida during a time when its boundaries had yet to be determined.

      It turns out that Manuel is “the Florida Pirate” for a reason that only becomes clear when we read the story in light of a spatial understanding of Florida as ground in flux. To those who understood Florida as a “terraqueous region” of islands, keys, and sandbars that change shape, size, and location depending on which geography textbook or map one consults, “The Florida Pirate” easily takes place in Florida. Furthermore, Manuel is “the Florida Pirate”—not by birth, but by belonging to the fragmented, shifting ground he masters.

      Recognizing that “The Florida Pirate” is about Florida by virtue of its geography enables us to interpret the tale as its early readers may have—that is, as a narrative of belonging on the elusive landscape of the nation’s most recent territorial acquisition. In this way Howison’s text belongs to an expansive archive of early American reflections on inhabiting Florida. It suggests that, while much of Florida could not foster the feelings and practices of solidarity that post-Revolutionary proponents of the continental ideal prized, the region generated models of habitation, community, and economy sustained by mobility.

      This message is particularly clear in Howison’s depiction of Manuel’s occupation as a Florida wrecker. Wreckers flourished along the Florida Reef during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by mastering ground where cargo ships frequently foundered. Essentially, wreckers were salvagers who profited by rescuing stranded vessels and crews in exchange for a substantial portion of the cargo to sell to the highest bidder in the domestic and foreign ports they frequented.⁵¹ Wreckers thrived, then, not only because of their intimate acquaintance with the intricacies of local terrain, but also because of their large network of associates, which often included escaped slaves, smugglers, Spanish fishermen, and independent adventurers—such as the white narrator of “The Florida Pirate” who supports himself by “forming a league with these outcasts of society.”⁵²