Two surveyors defined Mullet Key on paper in the eighteenth century, and the Revolution split them. George Gauld stayed loyal to the Crown; Bernard Romans turned Patriot. Both gave the island some of its earliest written record, and both, in a strange symmetry, died as prisoners or castaways of war. Romans is the one who set down the first human structures known on Mullet Key, and he did it as part of producing one of the great descriptive works of colonial America.
Bernard Romans was Dutch-born, by the common account around 1720 in the Netherlands, though some records point to a baptism at Delft in 1741; he was the son of Pieter Barendsz Romans and Margareta van der Linden, and he was educated in England. He came to the Americas around 1755 to 1757 in British service, and he was far more than a surveyor: a navigator and ship's captain, a cartographer, a self-taught naturalist and botanist, a draughtsman and engineer, the kind of wide-ranging Enlightenment observer the age produced. He sailed as a privateer under the British flag during the Seven Years' War and traded from the Caribbean to Canada, until he lost his ship and his fortune on the treacherous reefs of the Florida cape and gave up the sea.
Romans came ashore for good in East Florida, where he was posted near St. Augustine before 1760 as a draughtsman and government botanist, and he claimed, with some justice, to have been the first surveyor settled in the province. He rose fast through the British engineering establishment: deputy surveyor of Georgia in 1766, and the following year deputy surveyor for the entire Southern District, reporting to the German-born surveyor general William Gerard de Brahm. In that work he charted vast stretches of the southeastern coast, including Mobile Bay and the Gulf shore, and his maps were judged better than any produced before, and for many years after, their making.
It is to Romans that this archive owes a small but real distinction in Mullet Key's record. In the course of his Florida surveys, he noted the presence of Spanish fishing huts on the island, the seasonal structures of the Cuban fishing crews who came each year to net and cure mullet for the Havana market. Those huts are the earliest known human-built structures recorded on Mullet Key. Where George Gauld gave the island its name and urged a fort upon it, Romans documented that people were already living and working there, however seasonally, generations before any soldier arrived.
In 1775 Romans published the work he is best remembered for, A Concise Natural History of East and West Florida, printed at New York and illustrated with twelve copperplate engravings he etched himself. It was two things at once: a practical guide for navigators and shippers detailing the sailing passages of the region, and a promoter's argument for trade and settlement, built on detailed observations of the climate, plants, animals, diseases, and peoples of the Floridas. It even waded into the great intellectual arguments of the day, on race, on slavery, on the merits of trade monopolies. He finished it on 25 April 1775, six days after the shots at Lexington and Concord, the worst possible moment to sell a book about the British colonies; he secured fewer than two hundred subscribers. It is, all the same, one of the foundational descriptive works on colonial Florida, consulted by historians still.
When the Revolution came, Romans, unlike his fellow surveyor Gauld, threw in with the rebels, at the cost of his British pension. Within days of finishing his book he volunteered as an engineer for the American expedition against Fort Ticonderoga, and he served the Patriot cause for four or five years, working on the fortifications of the Hudson. He married Elizabeth Whiting, by one account introduced to her by George Washington himself. Then his luck turned: captured by the British late in the war, he was held as a prisoner, and around 1784, while being carried home from captivity, he died at sea, by the persistent account murdered for the sum of money he was carrying. The parallel with Gauld is almost too neat to be true: the two men who, more than any others, fixed Mullet Key in the eighteenth-century record, one a Loyalist, one a Patriot, both ending their lives as prisoners of the war that divided them. Neither ever lived on the island they helped define, and neither saw what became of it.