Free The History of Florida by Michael Gannon

characteristics of soils can be modified if not completely
    overcome. Heat and humidity do not trouble individuals living and work-
    ing in air-conditioning. Still other aspects of the region’s ecology—notably
    floral and faunal diversity—have been profoundly altered when Old World
    peoples introduced, and continue to introduce, what Alfred Crosby has
    called their portmanteaux biota. Too, since Europeans and their enslaved,
    and later freed, African companions arrived, the Floridas have never been
    without trade with the world and thus means to overcome local ecologi-
    cal y linked problems of subsistence and economic prosperity. Indeed, since
    the late nineteenth century, peninsular Florida’s general y warm dry winters
    have attracted persons from colder climes, creating tourism and retirement
    industries that capitalize on at least those aspects of the state’s ecology. Even
    so, some characteristics of the region’s ecology—notably periods of drought
    · 41 ·
    42 · Paul E. Hoffman
    and tropical storms—are beyond modern control. This chapter explores the
    ecology of the Floridas, especial y with regard to the colonial and early-
    nineteenth-century periods when it had the greatest impact on human lives.1
    The late-sixteenth-century Spanish royal cartographer Juan Lopez de
    Velasco claimed as Spanish Florida (La Florida) the vast region running
    from the cod fisheries of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and northern New
    England to as far south as the Florida Keys and west along the Gulf coast to
    the Soto La Marina River in Mexico. Inland, it reached as far west as the un-
    defined eastern edge of New Mexico. If this La Florida had a northwestern
    boundary, it was the supposed arm of the Pacific Ocean that was thought
    to reach deep into the continent to the north of New Mexico to an elusive
    point west of the Appalachian Mountains.
    In sixteenth-century practice, those grand, vague boundaries shrank to
    encompass the coastal and piedmont zones of the modern states of Virginia,
    North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama; the Appalachian Moun-
    tains of the Carolinas; southeastern Tennessee and northern Alabama; an
    undetermined part of the Gulf of Mexico’s northern coast and the Missis-
    sippi Valley; and peninsular Florida. This definition arose from coastal ex-
    plorations and the de Soto expedition’s peregrination through the Southeast
    (see mapon p. <000>[refers to fig. 2.4]). In legal and diplomatic terms, it
    proof
    was a claim based on discovery and possession taking as wel as the so-
    called Papal Donation and the Treaty of Tordesil as of 1494. Yet within this
    area, effective occupation and influence extended only as far as Spanish
    settlements or missions or active trade did, which in the sixteenth century
    effectively meant coastal areas of peninsular north Florida, Georgia, and
    South Carolina, and, briefly in the 1560s, the Carolinas’ piedmont (see map
    on p. <00>[refers to fig. 6.1]). During the seventeenth century, the area of
    active missions expanded into various parts of the interior of the penin-
    sula (see mapon p. <00>[refers to fig. 6.2]). Trade via Native American
    intermediaries may have reached farther into the backcountry that is today
    western Georgia and Alabama, but we know little about it. That is, Spain’s
    La Florida in reality was based on effective occupation of only a small part
    of the expansive land claims its diplomats sometimes made in negotiations
    in Europe or that its maps and geographers laid down.
    As chapters 4, 5, 6, and 8 show, epidemics among the Native American
    populations (limiting the area of mission work and trade), wars, and Euro-
    pean treaties slowly reduced La Florida’s effective extent. When the British
    took over the colony in 1764, they decreed the northern limit of today’s state
    (31° North and the course of the St. Marys River) but did not accept the
    The Land They Found · 43
    Franco-Spanish understanding of 1723 that the Perdido River