Indigenous interior accounts and Lake Wales Ridge topography in the survey texts of Bernard Romans and William Gerard De Brahm

Although eighteenth-century British mapmakers left the interior of peninsular Florida blank south of 28° North latitude on their published maps, the accompanying narrative texts by the two principal British surveyors of the Floridas—Bernard Romans and William Gerard De Brahm—exhibit a stark divergence regarding interior geography and Indigenous testimony.[cumming-1998] Bernard Romans recorded firsthand overland descriptions of the Lake Wales Ridge and transcribed detailed geographical accounts from Creek informants and Spanish fishermen regarding interior lakes and canoe passages.[romans-1775] By contrast, William Gerard De Brahm confined his surveys to coastal waters and the St. Johns River, gathering no Indigenous accounts of the south-central peninsula.[de-brahm-1772-report]

Bernard Romans and the Lake Wales Ridge

In A Concise Natural History of East and West Florida (1775), civil engineer and surveyor Bernard Romans published observations from his 1769 overland trek across the Florida peninsula along roughly 28° North latitude.[romans-1775] Striking westward toward the Gulf of Mexico roughly fifteen miles north of Tampa Bay, Romans encountered the high sandy spine of the Lake Wales Ridge, describing it as an elevated landscape of scrub, clear lakes, and open savannahs:

“imagine then to yourself a country gradually rising into a ridge of highland, very barren, sandy and gravelly, a few places excepted, intersected with abundance of rivulets, and variegated with ponds and lakes, whose banks being in general lined with oak Magnolia, and other trees, exhibit the most romantic scene imaginable… We frequently meet with spacious savannahs of the high kind; the country is covered with roe deer and turkies, the lakes stocked with fish, and thus it continues in a due west line across the Mexican gulph to the said latitude 28.”[romans-1775]

Romans also made a second overland trek from Tampa Bay across the interior to St. Augustine.[romans-1775] Although his field journal from that crossing was lost several years prior to publication, Romans recorded from memory that the interior became more stony toward the south while remaining interspersed with the same characteristic sandhill ponds and lakes.[romans-1775]

Indigenous accounts of interior waterways in Romans’s text

Because Romans did not conduct an instrumental trigonometrical survey of the interior, he omitted rivers and lakes south of 28° N from his published 1776 map to avoid cartographic conjecture.[cumming-1998] In his text, however, Romans preserved Indigenous oral geography describing the interior lake systems and their connections to the coasts.[romans-1775]

Romans gathered intelligence directly from Creek travelers from “Taloffh Ochasi” (Talassee Ochase), an Upper Creek town whose hunting and settlement parties were moving into the Florida peninsula:

“however, the savages of Taloffh Ochasi told me, that in going far south, they go round a, large water, emptying itself into the west sea, i. e. gulph of Mexico.”[romans-1775]

Romans linked this Creek description of skirting a major southern water body to broader Indigenous accounts of trans-peninsular canoe routes:

“whether there is really this lake, or not, i will not be positive, but the above circumstances, joined to a dark account, which the savages give of going up St. John’s, and coming down another river, to go into some far southern region of East Florida… seems to confirm it.”[romans-1775]

Romans corroborated these Indigenous accounts with testimony from a Spanish fisherman and pilot who reported being taken prisoner by Indigenous people and transported by canoe into “lake Mayacco” (Lake Okeechobee), a lake estimated at seventy-five miles in circumference.[romans-1775] The pilot described an outflowing river marked by a small cedar island at the lake’s margin and five or six tributary streams, leading Romans to deduce that some of the streams he had crossed on the ridge flowed southward into this interior basin.[romans-1775]

William Gerard De Brahm’s survey limits

William Gerard De Brahm served as Surveyor General of the Southern District of North America from 1764 to 1770.[mowat-1942] His comprehensive report, presented in manuscript form to the Crown in 1772 and 1773 and published by Louis De Vorsey Jr. in 1971, was devoted primarily to maritime navigation, hydrography, meteorological tables, and coastal land grants.[de-brahm-1772-report] In 1772 De Brahm separately published The Atlantic Pilot, providing sailing directions for the Florida Reef and the Gulf Stream.[de-brahm-1772-pilot]

De Brahm’s inland surveys were confined strictly to the St. Johns River corridor, which he ascended by boat in 1766, reaching its marshy headwaters south of Lake Poinsett in 1768.[corse-1939] De Brahm conducted no overland expeditions across the Lake Wales Ridge and recorded no Creek, Seminole, or Calusa accounts of interior lakes or waterways.[corse-1939]

De Brahm’s failure to gather interior Indigenous geography stemmed from his institutional focus on coastal navigation and British diplomatic friction with native inhabitants.[cumming-1998] While surveying the northern border along the St. Marys River, De Brahm noted that “the jealousy of the Indians has not as yet permitted me to make a survey” of interior tracts.[corse-1939] Consequently, his 1769 map The Ancient Tegesta and his Report left the entire peninsular interior south of the St. Johns headwaters an unexamined vacuum, making Bernard Romans the sole British official surveyor to document the topography of the ridge and Indigenous accounts of south-central peninsular waterways.[cumming-1998]

References

• romans-1775 — Bernard Romans. A Concise Natural History of East and West Florida. 1775. https://archive.org/details/concisenaturalhi00roma
• de-brahm-1772-report — William Gerard De Brahm. Report of the General Survey in the Southern District of North America (ed. Louis De Vorsey Jr., 1971). 1971. https://earlyfloridalit.net/william-gerard-de-brahm/
• de-brahm-1772-pilot — William Gerard De Brahm. The Atlantic Pilot. 1772. https://earlyfloridalit.net/william-gerard-de-brahm/
• corse-1939 — Carita Doggett Corse. DeBrahm’s Report on East Florida, 1773. 1939. https://stars.library.ucf.edu/fhq/vol17/iss3/7/
• mowat-1942 — Charles L. Mowat. That Odd Being De Brahm. 1 April 1942. https://stars.library.ucf.edu/fhq/vol20/iss4/
• cumming-1998 — William P. Cumming. The Southeast in Early Maps (Third Edition, revised by Louis De Vorsey Jr.). 1998. https://upress.virginia.edu/title/1543/

Where this comes from

Evidence

corroborated — More than one independent source agrees.

Review

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

Rights

society

Sources

1. Bernard Romans, A Concise Natural History of East and West Florida (1775) · book
2. William Gerard De Brahm, Report of the General Survey in the Southern District of North America (ed. Louis De Vorsey Jr., 1971) (1971) · book
3. William Gerard De Brahm, The Atlantic Pilot (1772) · book
4. Carita Doggett Corse, DeBrahm's Report on East Florida, 1773 (1939) · secondary
5. Charles L. Mowat, That Odd Being De Brahm (1942) · secondary
6. William P. Cumming, The Southeast in Early Maps (Third Edition, revised by Louis De Vorsey Jr.) (1998) · book

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