The History of Florida (75 page)

streets filled with a babble of Spanish and French, slave accents from West

Africa, and American voices from everywhere.” Recovered furniture, silver,

china, women’s finery, and men’s garments went to auction houses in New

Orleans, Savannah, and elsewhere. The federal court licensed some fifty Key

West salvage operations in the 1850s, when ships were “piling up on the

Florida by Nature: A Survey of Extrahuman Historical Agency · 359

[Florida] reef at the rate of nearly one a week.” The decade averaged nearly

five Atlantic hurricanes per year.6

Hurricanes are conveyors of history. They have always been a part of the

Florida experience, but they are not simply a Florida phenomenon. They

come from somewhere distant, do their damage, and move on to some-

place else. Although they blow things away, they also bring things with

them. Many of Florida’s tropical plants and some of its fauna were carried

on strong winds or heavy seas to the peninsula from across the Caribbean.

Tropical storms washed in the spoil of shipwrecks, too, of course. While

salvage crews welcomed big blows, most Floridians general y feared them.

They represented God’s wrath or nature’s fury, depending on one’s perspec-

tive. They were not the sort of phenomenon that endeared one to nature’s

power. “Florida,” writes Neil Frank, former director of the National Hur-

ricane Center, “has had a long and brutal hurricane history.” This is not sur-

prising for a landmass such as the 450-mile-plus Florida peninsula, which

exposes itself to the vagaries of Atlantic Ocean weather on the east and the

Gulf of Mexico on the west. Most Atlantic hurricanes form north of the

equator and move east to west, a good many of them drawn to the shallow,

warm waters of the Gulf. Nearly 40 percent of al U.S. hurricanes hit Florida.

Sixty-two did so in the twentieth century.7

proof

The Spanish dealt with a perplexing number during the conquest period.

What may in part account for Florida’s strong aboriginal defense against

initial Spanish encounters were early warnings. More than likely, the Indi-

ans who resisted Juan Ponce in 1513 had previously encountered bearded,

strangely clad men, dead and alive, in the storm wash onshore. Shipwrecked

at the age of thirteen in 1549 or 1550, Hernando d’Escalante Fontaneda lived

with Florida Indians for seventeen years, learning their languages and teach-

ing them his. Pedro Menéndez de Avilés found him in 1566 living with the

Calusa and used him as an interpreter. Historians would know less about

Florida’s indigenous people if not for the memoir of his captivity and, fore-

most, for the storm that wrecked his ship.

The French, not the Spanish, might have found him if not for an Atlantic

gale the year before. Florida was contested territory by the time Menén-

dez landed at present-day St. Augustine in September 1565. The French had

already begun building a fort north of the St. Johns River and were deter-

mined to subvert Spanish claims to Florida. Under the leadership of Jean

Ribault, the French attempted the first strike from sea before a nor’easter

drove the ships down the coast. Menéndez knew the fate such weather could

360 · Jack E. Davis

deliver. He had previously lost a son somewhere off Florida to a storm, and

of the nineteen ships that had left Spain under his command, only five made

it to Florida. Fortune turned for him when the nor’easter thwarted Ribault’s

assault, giving the Spanish the advantage over their superior rival. Menén-

dez hunted down the shipwrecked French. Upon their slaughter, he secured

Spanish sovereignty in Florida and, with it, east coast harbors of safe refuge

for ships of the treasure fleet.

One place where the Spanish failed initial y to find security from nature

was the Florida panhandle. In 1559, Pensacola was poised to become the first

successful y settled European city north of Mexico when conquistador Tris-

tán de Luna y Arel ano set sail in June from Vera Cruz with thirteen ships

carrying a ready-made colony of 1,500 soldiers and settlers, the requisite

missionaries, and necessary provisions. They raised the flag of empire and

planted the cross of Christianity on a red bluff along the eastern shores of

Pensacola’s deep and well-protected bay, seemingly ideal for safe harborage.

The “best port in the Indies,” de Luna called it in a letter to the king. Proving

that claim wrong, a hurricane came up the Gulf of Mexico that September

and scattered the colony, which was ful y abandoned two years later. The

viceroy in Mexico declared the region off-limits to settlement, and the Span-

ish kept their distance for 137 years. They final y secured a colonized footing

proof

in Pensacola in 1698. Once again, they were responding to their French ri-

vals, who were searching for the mouth of the Mississippi River to establish

a natural waterway between the Gulf of Mexico and their North American

claims.8

Bad weather 163 years later deprived Pensacola of another first, the open-

ing shots of the Civil War. After Florida seceded from the Union, Federal

forces retained control of Pensacola’s four brick forts. President Lincoln dis-

patched supply ships and reinforcements to Fort Sumter, South Carolina,

and to Pensacola to prevent Confederate takeovers. An Atlantic gale delayed

the convoy, and the same foul weather foiled Confederate plans to attack

Pensacola’s Fort Pickens. By the time reinforcements arrived, violating a

truce between the two sides, Federal forces, on April 13, 1861, had already

surrendered Fort Sumter to the Confederates.

Forts withstood hurricanes better than private dwellings, compelling

Floridians to contemplate their location. The Apostle Matthew maintained,

“A foolish man built his house upon the sand, and the rain fel , and the

floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fel .” For

a while, Floridians heeded Matthew’s admonition. Charles Pierce, who grew

up in south Florida in the 1870s, said, “No one thought of building much

Florida by Nature: A Survey of Extrahuman Historical Agency · 361

near the ocean, because it would eventual y sweep any structure away.” Fort

Myers was founded under those circumstances. When an 1841 hurricane

wiped out the Second Seminole War outpost Fort Dulany at Punta Rassa,

the military retreated from the Gulf shores and built a new instal ation at

present-day Fort Myers. Ultimately, Floridians threw caution to the wind

and lined the seacoast with homes and hotels, only to see a big blow pummel

them time and again. After the 1926 Miami hurricane, John J. Farrey, chief

building inspector for Miami Beach, which had been flattened in the storm,

drew up the first building codes instituted in Florida. (Farrey has been hon-

ored by the state as a Great Floridian for his initiative.) Persistent dwelling

damage from a long string of storms in the 1950s (including Baker, Easy,

King, Love, How, Able, Florence, Hazel, Brenda, Flossy, Greta, Debbie, El a,

and Judith) forced a widespread restructuring of poorly conceived munici-

pal and county building codes. Some had been imported from the North,

addressing irrelevant issues such as snow loading and soil frost lines but

not wind loading. Requiring more rigid construction, however, mitigated

apprehensions about inhabiting danger’s alley. Beginning in 1970, the state

took modest initiatives, though stil bold in real-estate-crazed Florida, to

move the population to safer ground. It instituted a mean-high-tide setback

of fifteen meters for new construction. That rule was followed a few years

proof

later by the Coastal Construction Control Line, which is based on a 100-year

storm surge.9 Houses had to be built on deep-set pilings with living space

limited to levels above floodwaters. Insurance companies and the Federal

Emergency Management Agency also required these regulations.10

Architectural design that bent away from nature was inconsistent with

earlier inclinations. A regional wood-frame vernacular emerged in the early

nineteenth century built to the elements. Today, the form is called Cracker

architecture. It had two principal requirements: limiting direct sun exposure

and maintaining natural ventilation. Situating a house on a lot to minimize

the hottest rays of late afternoon and to take advantage of shade trees was a

first consideration. Using local materials, in particular pine and cedar, both

of which are resistant to indigenous termites, homesteaders constructed the

foundation a foot or two above the ground on piers of brick (later of con-

crete block or poured cement). Elevating the house not only enhanced air

flow; it kept occupants above flooding water. Windows in every wall and a

dog trot—an open space running from the front to the back—between two

halves of the house brought flowing air inside. Tall ceilings and steeply an-

gled roofs gathered the warmest air above living areas. On the Gulf shores,

the vernacular changed slightly; roofs were usual y drawn to a shallow pitch

362 · Jack E. Davis

to withstand storm winds. Porches were designed to provide outside shade

but also to keep the sun from penetrating the interior. When they could af-

ford to do so, Floridians built front and back porches and even side porches.

New architectural styles were coming into vogue by the next century.

A leading figure who introduced a Mediterranean style was architect and

Boca Raton visionary Addison Mizner. The arches, colonnades, French

doorways, barrel-tile roofs, and pastel colors all seemed to fit with the palm

trees, flowering frangipanis, waterscape, and general warmth and sunshine

of the American Mediterranean. When architects like Mizner incorporated

new designs, they usual y borrowed the passive technologies of the Cracker

house. Even brick and block homes were raised on suspended foundations

with a ventilated crawl space below. The dog trot was enclosed and turned

into a hal way between left and right rooms but remained front-to-rear

breezeways with an exterior door at each end. Windows were plentiful and

ceilings high. Mizner typical y kept the footprint one-room deep to facilitate

cross-ventilation. Home designs changed sharply with the advent of resi-

dential air-conditioning, which by 2000 had become as common in Florida

homes as a kitchen or bathroom. Houses were built on slab foundations,

ceilings were lowered, windows grew smal er and fewer, and the dog trot

and porch disappeared. Florida was turning into an indoor culture. Its resi-

proof

dents were losing touch with the natural conditions that had attracted so

many to the Sunshine State.

Environmental historian Alfred Crosby argues that in the era of global

conquests, parts of the world with natural conditions most familiar to Eu-

ropeans pulled strongest. The English tended to regions with a temperate

climate, and the Spanish concentrated in subtropical and tropical places.

Settlement was facilitated when Europeans were able to reproduce plants

and animals that had sustained them in the Old World. Florida may have

lacked the craggy countryside of Spain, but it suggested other ecological

possibilities. The new settlers brought citrus from southern Spain to plant

in Florida’s sandy soil and beef cattle to graze on its prairies. Florida had

the first European horses and cattle introduced north of Mexico. The line of

the latter never died out. They were left to forage on indigenous vegetation

until needed for market or table, and after the Spanish left Florida, the hardy

animals went feral. Seminoles and yeomen farmers plucked them from the

wild, bred them, consumed them, and sold them. Modern-day ranchers

learned the Spanish breed required no winter feed as did imported west-

ern cattle; they quietly fended for themselves. Although the Spanish never

Florida by Nature: A Survey of Extrahuman Historical Agency · 363

succeeded in developing a profitable beef industry, Floridians of subsequent

generations stuck with the Spanish vision. In 2007, the oldest cattle-raising

state ranked eleventh among U.S. states in the number of beef cattle.

Cattle are not a species that comes to mind at the thought of Florida. What

does evoke familiarity is lemon, lime, grapefruit, and orange trees. Pastoral

Florida was not the conventional farmhouse on a hil side surrounded by

verdant or amber fields carved out of the wooded wilderness. It was instead

the perfect green of citrus accented with white blossoms and ripening fruit

planted in neat rows opening to the flat interior horizon. A citrus grove is

what environmental historians call second nature, a human-modified envi-

ronment that resembles an indigenous one. But Florida has been associated

with the round, dimple-skinned fruit that ripens into sunshine colors for so

long that it seems organic. Much like the Fountain of Youth, its juicy savori-

ness and persistence stand with the idea of vitality and youthful endeavor

that defines the Sunshine State. Stowe observed long ago, “The orange-tree

is, in our view, the best worthy to represent the tree of life of any that grows