A Concise Natural History of East and West Florida.

A Concise Natural History of East and West Florida. By Bernard Romans. Edited and with an introduction by Kathryn E. Holland Braund. (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, c. 1999. Pp. xiv, 442. $44.95, ISBN 0-8173-0876-8.)

Kathryn Braund here provides Bernard Romans with an asset lacking since the publication of his book, namely, credibility. Romans was accused of exaggeration and falsehood by his contemporaries and therefore has been doubted by historians. But now Braund's careful editing sorts out fact from opinion. The factual information is essential to an understanding of the Gulf frontier on the eve of the American Revolution. Romans' s opinions, however, remain bizarre.

Bernard Romans was a supremely self-confident individual who went from one failure to another. He was born around 1720 in the Netherlands, came to America in 1757, and served as a surveyor in Georgia. Romans worked under the brilliant but cantankerous William G. De Brahm, who neglected to pay him, drew maps for John Stuart without getting credit, proposed establishing a garden in West Florida to Dr. Alexander Garden, who pronounced him an incompetent, and volunteered to lead an expedition across America, Asia, and Europe to Lord Dartmouth, who ignored the offer. Almost like a fictional character, Romans had a knack of being where the action was during the Revolution. He was in Boston when the Tea Party occurred. He was back again in time for the battle of Bunker Hill and did a drawing of the battle. Paul Revere helped copperplate his maps. He built a fort in the wrong place in the Hudson River, faced a court-martial at Fort Ticonderoga, ridiculed the make-shift fleet Benedict Arnold built on Lake Champlain that subsequently checked a British invasion, and lost the second volume of his book when a mob sacked his printers' shop. In a final indignity, his widow was denied a pension, even though Romans died in the service of the Revolution.

Despite the setbacks and failures, Romans succeeded in producing his book. Braund observes that he was more astute than some others in his noting that the Indians did not want to conform to European civilization. Romans's reason was not complimentary, however, in that he believed Indians were "incapable of civilization" (p. 110). Braund makes allowance for the biases and cultural ignorance of the men of his day. It would be easier to excuse him on these grounds, except that other contemporaries did not share his views. James Adair, David Taitt, George Galphin, and Benjamin Hawkins did not, and William Bartram seems to have written his book as a deliberate refutation of Romans's views. The final word must be that Kathryn Braund has done an outstanding job of research and enhanced the value of Romans's Concise History.

EDWARD J. CASHIN
Augusta State University