Bernard Romans’s 1769 peninsular crossing along 28° N: topographic correlation and limits of reconstruction

Bernard Romans’s 1769 overland journey across peninsular Florida cannot be plotted as a specific turn-by-turn route or continuous line on modern topographic quadrangle and archaeological maps.[romans-1775][phillips-1924] While Romans provided the earliest firsthand British account of the central ridge country between 28° and 29° North latitude, two insurmountable evidentiary constraints limit modern cartographic reconstruction to a broad physiographic corridor: the permanent loss of his original field survey journal before publication, and the synthetic rather than empirical nature of his east-west profile along the 28th parallel.[romans-1775][phillips-1924]

The lost overland journal of 1769

In the summer of 1769, upon concluding hydrographic surveys of Tampa Bay and the central Gulf coast, Romans lost his survey vessel in the “Manatee” River (identified by cartographic historian John D. Ware as the present Hillsborough River).[phillips-1924] Leaving the coast in June 1769, Romans engaged an Indigenous guide and pack horses to conduct an overland trek across the interior to St. Augustine, where he arrived in September.[phillips-1924]

This actual journey traveled diagonally northeastward across the peninsula over a period of roughly three months, rather than due east along a single parallel of latitude.[phillips-1924] In his published volume, A Concise Natural History of East and West Florida (1775), Romans explicitly recorded that his original daily field journal from this expedition was irretrievably lost four or five years prior to publication—roughly 1770 or 1771.[romans-1775] Without this field notebook, Romans preserved no compass bearings, measured chain distances, stream crossings, daily camp coordinates, or Indigenous trail names for the peninsular interior.[romans-1775] His published text drew entirely upon unassisted recollection and general notes.[romans-1775]

Disentangling the 28° N profile from the overland trek

A recurring ambiguity in Florida historiography arises from conflating Romans’s actual travel path with his regional physical descriptions.[romans-1775][phillips-1924] In his chapter on the interior country, Romans described a cross-peninsular profile along latitude 28°00′ N, extending from the narrow divide between the upper St. Johns River marsh and the Indian River lagoon due west across the peninsula to the Gulf of Mexico, striking the coast fifteen miles north of Tampa Bay (in the vicinity of modern Tarpon Springs and the Anclote River).[romans-1775]

He framed it as a geographic overview — “imagine then to yourself a country gradually rising into a ridge of highland… and thus it continues in a due west line across… to the said latitude 28” — and not as the itinerary of an east-west expedition.[romans-1775] Romans never conducted an instrumental traverse or marched a survey party along 28°00′ N.[romans-1775][phillips-1924]

Furthermore, Romans described crossing “twenty three miles from east to west of miserable barren sand hills” where his Indigenous guide carried water for their party and horses.[romans-1775] Romans explicitly situated this 23-mile scrub crossing “between the rivers St. John and Ocklaw-wawhaw… where we crossed it, is its narrowest place.”[romans-1775] This feature corresponds geomorphologically to the Mount Dora Ridge and Big Scrub in modern Marion and Lake counties near latitude 29° N, rather than the Lake Wales Ridge in Polk or Highlands counties.[romans-1775][white-1970]

Macro-topographic correlation with the Lake Wales Ridge

Although a precise track cannot be plotted, Romans’s descriptive observations correlate directly with the macro-physiography of the northern Lake Wales Ridge and upper Peace River drainage basin in central Polk County.[romans-1775][white-1970]

Romans recounted that during a dry season, his party traveled over the central high sandy ridge “almost in its longitudinal direction” between latitudes 28° and 29° N, enduring five days without surface water.[romans-1775] He noted that the highest parts of the pine ridges contained “very great holes, fifty or sixty feet deep, and thirty or forty feet in diameter at the surface,” which in wet seasons held potable water but during his crossing were entirely dry.[romans-1775]

Geologically, these steep-sided dry depressions match the mantled karst solution dolines and sinkhole basins characteristic of the Cypresshead and Hawthorn formations along the spine of the Lake Wales Ridge in Polk County, where surface drainage is largely absent and precipitation rapidly infiltrates deep sands into the underlying Floridan aquifer system.[white-1970][adamski-knowles-2001] At latitude 28°00′ N, the ridge rises to elevations exceeding 200 to 295 feet above sea level between modern Lake Wales (27°54′ N) and Dundee and Winter Haven (28°01′ N), culminating at Iron Mountain (27°56′ N).[white-1970] West of this ridge crest at 28° N lies the upper Peace River basin and Lake Hancock drainage (27°58′–28°02′ N), flanked by the Winter Haven Ridge and Polk Upland.[white-1970]

Limits of archaeological and cartographic mapping

On modern 7.5-minute United States Geological Survey topographic quadrangles and Florida Master Site File archaeological inventories, Romans’s traverse cannot be tied to any discrete geographic coordinate or prehistoric trail feature.[romans-1775] While prehistoric and historic Indigenous trails crossed the sand ridges of Polk County between Tampa Bay and the St. Johns drainage, no specific camp site, water hole, or artifact scatter can be definitively attributed to Romans’s 1769 traverse.[romans-1775][phillips-1924]

Cartographic and historical documentation demonstrates that Romans traversed the broad physiographic upland of the northern Lake Wales Ridge and upper Peace River in summer 1769, but any attempt to draw a discrete line on a modern map represents modern conjecture rather than eighteenth-century empirical record.[romans-1775][phillips-1924]

References

• romans-1775 — Bernard Romans. A Concise Natural History of East and West Florida. 1775. https://archive.org/details/concisenaturalhi00roma
• phillips-1924 — P. Lee Phillips. Notes on the Life and Works of Bernard Romans (ed. John D. Ware, 1975). 1975. https://ufdc.ufl.edu/AA00062402/00001
• white-1970 — William A. White. The Geomorphology of the Florida Peninsula (Geological Bulletin No. 51). 1970. https://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00000149/00001
• adamski-knowles-2001 — J. C. Adamski and L. Knowles, Jr. Ground-Water Quality and Occurrence and Distribution of Selected Constituents in the Surficial and Intermediate Aquifer Systems in Southern Florida (USGS Water-Resources Investigations Report 01-4008). 2001. https://pubs.usgs.gov/wri/wri014008/

Related

• Finding: Indigenous interior accounts and Lake Wales Ridge topography in the survey texts of Bernard Romans and William Gerard De Brahm
• Finding: Eighteenth-century colonial cartography and Highlands County
• Finding: Earliest cartographic appearance of Lake Istokpoga and the Kissimmee River
• Image: Bernard Romans, A General Map of the Southern British Colonies in America (1776)

Where this comes from

Evidence

corroborated — More than one independent source agrees.

Review

unverified — Drafted from sources but not yet checked by a volunteer.

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Sources

1. Bernard Romans, A Concise Natural History of East and West Florida (1775) · book
2. P. Lee Phillips, Notes on the Life and Works of Bernard Romans (ed. John D. Ware, 1975) (1975) · book
3. William A. White, The Geomorphology of the Florida Peninsula (Geological Bulletin No. 51) (1970) · official
4. J. C. Adamski and L. Knowles, Jr., Ground-Water Quality and Occurrence and Distribution of Selected Constituents in the Surficial and Intermediate Aquifer Systems in Southern Florida (USGS Water-Resources Investigations Report 01-4008) (2001) · official

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