- 1 Though there is technically no “Great Britain” until the Act of Union in 1707, the terms Briton, Br (...)
1Early modern travel writers, among others, valued cartographic images as an alternative and synthetic access to knowledge which came in various forms and from different sources. In his report on his quest for gold in the New World, Walter Ralegh suggested that “to speak of what passed homeward were tedious, either to describe or name any of the rivers, islands, or villages” so that “we will leave all those to the general map” (458). In the following decades, knowledge in cartographic form became prized not just by state-sponsored explorers, but also by corporate circles, with geographical knowledge informing business decisions made in an early imperial context. However, to achieve that result, Britain needed reliable information and mediators of its own.1
- 2 See for instance the “Commission from the Company to Alexander Sharpie and Richard Rowles for the F (...)
2Though English travel in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries resulted in a good deal of first-hand reports, mapmakers heavily relied on fellow Europeans’ experience for geographical intelligence. Iberians had been the first to settle and trade in the Indies and in the west, while the Low Countries (which had an East India Company of their own) enjoyed a golden age in cartographic production. Jan Huygen van Linschoten’s accounts of Iberian experience across Asia in the sixteenth century – which contained printed maps of Asian locations – for example, was a source which was widely read and used by the English to undermine Portuguese hegemony in Asian markets. The East India Company (founded in 1600) and the Virginia Company of London (1606) also drew on external sources to devise their plans. They famously sought the geographical and economic expertise of such men as Richard Hakluyt who furnished them with material, including of a cartographic nature.2 Generally speaking, Asia was better known to the English than America, and a larger body of literature was available to the English when they began their corporate ventures in the East Indies. That greater theoretical familiarity with Asia was reflected by European mappings, where Asia was better delineated but also “fuller” than the American continent.
3In terms of mapmaking, the English were still behind in the late sixteenth century and many maps then circulating in England were of foreign extraction. Among the documents the promotional writer, scholar, travel writing compiler, cleric and map-enthusiast Richard Hakluyt brought to the initial East India Company meeting in 1600 were a “greate Italian map” which he had “translated and caused to be drawne for the Company” and two copies of an Italian map of the Moluccas (Hackel and Mancall 428). Maps (including those favoured by company agents) were also mostly Dutch and Flemish. Hakluyt passionately praised the work of Abraham Ortelius in his correspondence (Taylor 155), while his literary successor, Samuel Purchas, extensively used maps designed by Jodocus Hondius, who is credited for most of the cartographic illustrations for Purchas his Pilgrimes (1625), a travel compendium of English voyages compiled after the model of Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations.
4One significant aspect of the cartographic medium is that it is highly adaptable and can accommodate a wide variety of sources. Foreign sources of authority in matters of geography were commonly used, but also not infrequently distrusted. Indeed, the European rivalry which played out both in Asia and in America also elicited suspicion as far as foreign maps were concerned. Contemporary records, correspondence and geographical compendia sometimes warned about the risks of encountering foreign deceit in cartographic form. Edward Dodsworth, for example, had complained that some geographical features on maps were “most false and eronious, which, as we maie conjecture, is lade downe by the Portingalls to make those seas seme more daingerous unto us” (Foster, The Voyage of Nicholas Downton 73-74). Purchas his Pilgrimes, where numerous foreign maps are printed apparently for lack of better English ones available, deplores the existence of “Maps purposely made false by the Spaniards” in an index of maps for the third volume.
- 3 John Rennie Short’s Cartographic Encounters draws attention to the conditions and modalities of hyb (...)
5To overcome that problem, the English sought to create their own cartographic archive. The initiative was mostly led or encouraged by trading companies which manifested a need for trustworthy maps, or at least an “original compilation” of verified sources accessed directly by the English. These exogenous sources were not only Iberian, Italian or Dutch, but also indigenous. Indeed, the developing English taste for maps was not solely quenched by data resulting from European exploration and “genius.” Ideas about Asia and America, as well as representations of these spaces, were also very much the result of interactions in Asia and America.3 From these interactions emerged maps such as those under study in this article. Both John Smith and William Hole’s Virginia (1606-12) and William Baffin and Thomas Roe’s map of Mughal India (1619) were the result of such cross-cultural encounters overseas. Though the indigenous strata of knowledge are not hidden, the maps were not designed to be conspicuously of foreign origin and design. Instead, they embody a complex cultural and epistemological negotiation which this article examines. Beyond the more obvious epistemic and informational stakes of the map, this paper seeks to draw attention to the early imperial ideology and rhetoric underpinning these forms, in a context of struggle over the most authoritative/loudest representation. In continuity with the work of decolonial scholars, this article aims to shed some light on the power play behind the use, invisibilisation or foregrounding of indigenous geographical knowledge.
6Unlike India, the Chesapeake area – known locally as Tsenacomacah – had not previously been mapped in detail by Europeans. For that reason, any Briton endeavouring to map the region had to place some trust in the indigenous intelligence which they collected to complete their first-hand surveys. The map of Virginia by John Smith and William Hole published as an illustration for Smith’s Map of Virginia. With a Description of the countrey, the commodities, people, government, and religion in 1612, reflects this double pull towards empirical knowledge and local geographical intelligence (fig. 1). The map mediated knowledge about (as well as from) indigenous people whom Smith and his companions met during their exploratory travels, drawing on a mostly oral, informal and sometimes ephemeral geographical archive.
- 4 The term “description” was sometimes used to characterise cartographic images. Baffin and Roe’s map (...)
7John Smith thus relates how, during an expedition led by Christopher Newport to explore the region’s hinterland upstream from Jamestown up to “Powhatan” and beyond, “foure or fiue sauages came vnto vs which described vnto vs the course of the Riuer” (A True Relation C2r). Though the form of those descriptions remains here unspecified, they most likely took a visual form since the British colonists struggled with verbal interactions with local populations in their native languages.4 Similar interactions described in other accounts such as the “relation” discussed in the following paragraph suggest that an area was “described” to the British by means of hand gestures or ephemeral maps drawn on the ground with a foot or stick. In his records, Smith does not clarify the extent to which such Algonquian “descriptions” (cartographic or otherwise) shaped the course of rivers drawn on his own map, but it seems probable that their outline resulted from a combination of these accounts – which he does not refute in his narrative – and his own observations as he travelled upriver.
- 5 Robert Tindall designed a “Draught” of the Chesapeake Bay in 1608 for Prince Henry to whom he sent (...)
- 6 Smith’s map locates them in a town labelled “Paspahegh” along the “Chickahamama” river, west of Jam (...)
- 7 Though the map does not adopt the name “Quirank,” the British continued to employ the place-name in (...)
8Knowledge-sharing not only took the form of oral or ephemeral geographical “descriptions.” Another British narrative of these early forays into the region titled “A relation of the Discovery of our River, from James Forte into the Maine: made by Captain Christofer Newport: and sincerely written and observed by a gent. of ye Colony” (May-June 1607), even records an encounter during which the group of British “Dyscoverers” – which included the British mapmakers John Smith and Robert Tindall – secured indigenous geographical knowledge in the form of an improvised paper map (Barbour 1:81).5 In late May 1607, the group came across members of the Paspahegh chiefdom which had frequent contacts with the British during the formative years of the colony.6 On that occasion, one individual “offred with his foote to describe the river to vs,” but the British explorers required their informant to rather sketch his map with “a pen and paper, whereupon the British had to “[show] first ye vse” of that medium” (Barbour 1:82), an account which suggests that drawing temporary sketches on ephemeral media was more common in these contexts than mapping space on paper. Pen in hand, the Paspahegh “layd out the whole River from the Chesseian bay to the end of it” and informed the colonists of “Ilettes in the Ryver” which Smith’s map modelises, and “an overfall of water” (“The Fales” on Smith’s map), two “kyngdomes” (possibly the “Monacans” and “Mannahoacks”) and “mountaines Quirank as he named them” (Barbour 1:82-83). While some of these locations feature on Smith’s map, others such as “Quirank” remain unnamed mountains.7 It is also likely that the shape of the river “layd out” by the Paspahegh informant was subsequently reproduced by the British on their maps, though mapmaking witnesses such as John Smith do not explicitly acknowledge copying these mappings.
- 8 “Many Kingdomes hee described mee to the heade of the Bay, which seemed to bée a mightie Riuer, iss (...)
9In his own account, Smith relates the same encounter in slightly different terms as he indicates that, at about the same time, a native interlocutor at Paspahegh “began to describe mee the Countreys beyonde the Falles, with many of the rest” (A True Relation C2r). The British captain, explorer and mapmaker, however, makes no mention of that “description” taking the form of a map on paper, and does not clarify the extent to which he relied on that information to map the corresponding area in the left portion of his map. In fact, the details provided in the other account are largely glossed over, and the “Quirank” mountains not even named, that toponym remaining absent on Smith and Hole’s Virginia map.8 The reasons for Smith’s omission of that information are not explained in his report, but probably had to do with the relevance (or lack thereof) of that information to British colonial plans since the mountains were believed to lie outside the scope of the settlers’ territorial ambitions and found themselves beyond the limits of British empirical knowledge.
10These cartographic encounters were no isolated examples. In fact, Smith concludes that his informant’s “description” had “[confirmed] what not onely Opechancanoyes, and an Indian which had beene prosoner to Pewhatan had before tolde mee” (A True Relation C2r). In the latter instance, the Powhatan leader (here, “Pewhatan”) had “[drawn] plots vpon the ground (according to his discourse) of all those regions” during Smith’s captivity among the Powhatans (Generall Historie 1:142). Here, Smith alludes to a kind of ephemeral sketch of local geography which does not appear on the British map in any shape or form. Though these “plots” are not visible on Smith and Hole’s map of Virginia, the cartouche in the top left hand corner showing Wahunsenacawh (here named “Powhatan”) as he “held this state & fashion when Capt Smith was deliuered to him prisoner 1607” does explicitly refer to that context. The map itself locates the site of that encounter in the town labelled “Powhatan” symbolised by a large longhouse west of Jamestown.
11As a result of these interactions, the British gleaned a substantial quantity of geographical information usually pertaining to the course of long rivers and indigenous toponymy. The dominant indigenous nomenclature on Smith and Hole’s map attests to those fruitful contacts and borrowings. By the author’s own admission, the place-names on the map – with the exception of “Iamestowne,” the English settlement, and other English names – were mostly obtained from conversations such as the encounter with the Paspaheghs who shared with Smith’s party the names of various locations in their native language. In the main text of his description of the country, Smith accounts for this name-gleaning process and occasionally explains the meaning and significance of those endonyms. For instance, there is a river “they call Powhatan according to the name of a principall country that lieth upon it” (Map of Virginia 4).
Fig. 1: John Smith and William Hole’s map of Virginia
John Smith, A Map of Virginia. With a description of the countrey, the commodities, people, government, and religion (1612)
Credits: Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division
- 9 The list appears in the collection of manuscript documents penned by Thomas Roe, now at the British (...)
- 10 Thomas Roe carried Mercator’s atlas with him to India and presented it as a gift to Jahangir who re (...)
- 11 Some discrepancies can be noted between Roe’s list and the map’s structure. Roe indicates that Kand (...)
12A similar problem of “accessing” trustworthy data on Indian geography arose. The East India Company’s early records are characterised by a “reliance on Asian interlocutors and intermediaries,” as Guido van Meersbergen has pointed out (Ethnography and Encounter 6). Thomas Roe’s writing and mapping were a part of that budding system of mediated knowledge, with the map engraved by William Baffin being itself a mediation of information obtained locally (fig. 2). Mughal cosmopolitanism, bolstered by Emperor Jahangir’s flexible “vision underpinning a non-sectarian multicultural permeability,” created conditions favourable to Britons seeking access to Indian state archives (Singh 121). Judging that no harm could come from opening the doors of his official records, the emperor granted Roe access to the court’s archives which included important information about the country’s geography and shifting territorial boundaries. It is difficult to pinpoint exactly which toponyms on the map specifically came from Thomas Roe’s perusals, and which were inspired by existing European models. Yet, the list of “the principall Cittyes and Riuers, the Scituation and borders, and Extent in Length and Breadth, as neere as by description I could geather them,” which Roe “tooke out of the Kings Register” compiled by Thomas Roe, offers insight into the extent to which Roe’s archival work enriched British knowledge about early seventeenth-century Indian geography (Purchas 1:578).9 Famous large cities such as Lahore, as well as port-cities under European control such as Goa which had been a Portuguese dominion for over a century, were already known to Europeans including the British by the early seventeenth century. The authoritative map of Asia by Gerard Mercator updated by Jodocus Hondius in a 1612 reedition of Mercator’s atlas (first published in 1570) accordingly showed these cities, but the Indian hinterland remained sparse.10 Roe’s research afforded fresh data regarding India’s towns, cities and administrative divisions which Baffin could use to improve the existing incomplete or outdated European maps, as well as crucial information about their relative importance and relevance to Mughal politics and economic life.11 These additions appear to have included cities such as Agra, Delhi (“Delli” on the map) or Surat where the East India Company established a factory. Overall, the density of Baffin and Roe’s map, compared with Mercator’s, exemplifies the importance of Roe’s archival investigations for the improvement of European cartographies of India. The method was deemed a successful one by Samuel Purchas who argued that “Sir Thomas Roes honourable industry” had “giuen you Indus and India,” which “no geographer before had done” (3:408). In addition, his efforts had enabled Roe to redress what he had deemed to be major cartographic flaws, with others mistakenly “bringing Indus thorow Cambaia,” for instance, unlike his own map (Purchas 3:408).
13Structurally, Baffin and Roe’s map also shows signs of the nature of Roe’s sources. These administrative records held at the imperial court concerned the Mughal empire whose territorial boundaries were frequently shifting as new conquered regions were absorbed. The map’s scope mirrors that focus on the early seventeenth-century Mughal empire which did not comprise the southern tip of the peninsula accordingly truncated by the map, unlike Mercator’s. Some of these territorial acquisitions were recent, and sometimes contested or unstable. The Gujarat region in the west, for example, had been conquered by the Mughals in 1573. Under Jahangir, the empire faced rebellions from Bengal. Hence, the view which Baffin and Roe’s map offered embraced the Mughal Empire’s perspective, ambitions and claims. The internal division of the empire into units separated by dotted lines on that map also points to a main non-European source, and reveals that the archives which Roe consulted were primarily tax records, rather than geographical learning.
14Additionally, there are visual testimonies of Roe’s contact with Mughal documentation and archives on the map he drew in collaboration with Baffin. The most conspicuous of those traces is the Mughal dynastic seal in the top right corner of the map, a symbol which Roe likely encountered when browsing imperial orders (among other official documents) in the court archives. That seal, which consists of a double circle with the upper part of the symbol representing imperial power and authority, is a witness of English “inside” knowledge of Mughal symbolism and language of power.
Fig. 2: William Baffin and Thomas Roe’s map of East India
William Baffin and Thomas Roe, A Description of East India Conteyning th’Empire of the Great Mogoll (1619)
Credits: The British Library
The fact that Baffin and Roe’s map was based on local sources together with the English map’s display of Mughal imperial insignia were not compatible with early English plans in India. There were different stakes in India than in colonial Virginia and no hope for territorial conquest, so that the company sponsored little (if any) exploration of the Indian hinterland, Baffin and Roe’s representation of which, as shown above, largely derived from Roe’s use of the Mughal archives. The idea of the East India Company’s ambassador was to glean general knowledge about the country and its resources, but mostly to gain footholds on the coastlines of India. The coastal towns where the East India Company set up its original factories, and which appear on Baffin and Roe’s map, largely derived from European sources including the English translation of Jan Huyghen van Linschoten’s Itinerario in 1598, which completed the composite cartographic picture but remained unacknowledged. The Mughal and Algonquian sources which the English companies’ envoys turned to were thus expected to be devoid of rival Europeans’ claims and biases, offering a relatively fresh canvas for English cartographers to work on. Indeed, the archive which Roe consulted contained such things as local tax records and administrative orders, which were meant for internal uses. These sources free of European filters and agendas lent them special credit. Drawing directly not on Portuguese maps but on the Mughal archive afforded the English an opportunity to rewrite space to their advantage in their bid to secure trading privileges and footholds of their own, even if only on a symbolic level. In addition, as Lauren Benton’s work on the legal valence of such mappings suggests, Britain’s pioneering cartographic representation of modern India could bolster British claims to sovereignty and colonial control in the long run.
- 12 On one such occasion, indigenous cosmographies had been mapped on the ground for the benefit of Joh (...)
15Significantly, John Smith and Thomas Roe did not merely admit to drawing on indigenous sources of knowledge: they made these borrowings a central claim to their scientific authority and political legitimacy. Indeed, part of the map’s epistemic credit derived from the notion that the British had had direct access to Algonquian and Mughal archives for information. On the Virginia map (fig. 3), Smith thus clarifies that “as far as you see the little Crosses on rivers, mountaines, or other places have beene discovered” and that anything other than that first-hand data collected by Smith and his companions was “had by information of the Savages” and “set downe, according to their instructions” (Complete Works 1:151, my italics). That claim is indirectly corroborated by the visualisation of encounters between the company’s colonists and the Algonquian. The cartouche inserted in the top left corner thus shows “Powhatan” as he “held this state & fashion” during a ceremony. The Anglo-Powhatan encounter behind that illustration was, crucially, the kind of moment when information – particularly about geography – was shared with the British who completed their maps and observations with that alternative form of first-hand data.12 Direct contacts, such as those mentioned by Smith and modelised by the map, conferred legitimacy to the map’s design and elicited trust. Hence, the map’s believability partly hinged on its deriving from authoritative indigenous sources. In that system of epistemic credit, readers were therefore expected to place their trust both in Smith’s word that part of the map had indeed been made “according to their instructions,” but also in the less directly verifiable reliability of those instructions.
Fig. 3: “To these crosses hath bin discouerd – what beyond is by relation”
John Smith, A Map of Virginia. With a description of the countrey, the commodities, people, government, and religion (1612) - detail
Credits: Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division
16On the other hand, Baffin and Roe’s map of Mughal India does not mention explicitly the extent to which it builds on Mughal sources of information, nor does it visualise contacts in the form of illustrations on the map itself. This can be accounted for by the fact that there was less of a need in the “Old World” to display novelty in the form of proto-ethnographic scenes, and the representational approach to those spaces and people were consequently less reifying. Other Europeans in the country and at court could have also easily attested to the veracity of Roe’s claims concerning his activity and Indian geography. Britain’s knowledge about Asia in general and India in particular was indeed less precarious than its understanding of the Chesapeake area.
- 13 On similar processes north of the Chesapeake, see Harley, ch. 6 “New England Cartography and the Na (...)
17English travel writing and cartography were “directly produced through processes of cross-cultural encounter in interaction with speakers, readers, and writers of very different sorts,” as Miles Ogborn phrases it (19). In agreement with Ogborn’s argument, Singh observes that the East India Company voyages, in particular, have left “for posterity a discursive site of encounters and interactions” (117). In that regard, maps emerge as evidence for (and sites of) such cultural interactions which necessarily generated discursive hybridity. Indeed, the British not only adopted, but also adapted the local knowledge which they fitted in their own cartographic image.13 These adaptations could be inadvertent, through the process of translating that material both into English and visual language.
- 14 This is an aspect discussed in more detail in my chapter for a forthcoming collective volume on Dec (...)
- 15 For a detailed overview of these toponymic challenges in early colonial Virginia, see Stewart.
18Despite an apparent reliance on indigenous sources of geographical knowledge, the inadequate reuse of Algonquian toponyms by the British entailed cultural muting and cosmological erasure.14 For instance, assuming that a river has a single name from its source to the sea, John Smith failed to understand that the name he was given for a specific part of the river he pointed to only applied to a short segment of that river.15 On his map of Virginia, “Paranakatank flu:” thus designates the entire course of the river from its source to its mouth, while the even longer and wider “Powhatan” river also bears the same name throughout. Considering furthermore that each community probably had its own name for various parts of a river, it seems unlikely that the “Paranakatank” and “Powhatan” rivers were accurately named on Smith and Hole’s map. In that sense, the map communicates, however accidentally, a homogenised and therefore distorted view of indigenous topography filtered through British worldviews and ambitions. In other instances, indigenous river names were even considered temporary labels to be altogether erased in the long run. To the north (that is, on the right), Smith and Hole’s map appends two different toponyms to a single river segment: one indigenous (“Sasqusahanough flu:”), the other English (“Smyths fales”). While one may consider that, as in other parts of the map, “Smyths fales” merely referred to the point where the British explorers reached the limit of their travels while “Sasqusahanough flu:” designated the course of the river leading up to that point, John Smith explains that, in fact, “Sasquesahanocks river we called Smiths falles” (Generall Historie 1:127). The endonym on the map was therefore only a temporary marker destined to disappear from subsequent colonial mappings.
- 16 That notion emerges from early modern material itself, and has been analysed by scholars, notably O (...)
19Mughal Indian discourse was considered somewhat more legible than the Algonquian.16 Nevertheless, mediation occurred through the translation process, which was not without its own meaningful side effects. The upper part of the seal modelised on the map is rimmed with an inscription in Latin reading “Monarchi Magni Mogoll Insignia Potentissimi” (“the seal of the almighty great Mughal monarch”). In that sense, the emblem provides an indigenous visual token of power while adapting it to an English readership to which the Latin caption is addressed. The lower half of the seal contains an Anglicised transcription of the name of the ruling emperor whose ancestors are numbered following the European numerical system. The map’s visual paraphernalia thus operates a transmission of signs of power in pedagogical form. To some extent, the seal is deprived of its symbolic completeness as it is translated and reified for an English audience to behold. In that context, the seal appears less as a witness of indigenous power than as an object of English knowledge. Now extracted from its original archival ecosystem, the seal no longer serves its purpose as a material trace of imperial power, being relocated into the corner of an English map and repurposed as an argument of epistemic credit in English cartographic discourse. The overall effect of the reframing of Algonquian toponymy or of such symbols as the Mughal seal is the homogenisation and domestication of foreign space. Indeed, local geographical knowledge represents the shapeless substance which the British cartographers fit into a gridded space proportioned according to English measurements (“A Scale of Inglish leagues” on the map of India, and “A scale of Leagues and halfe Leagues” on the Virginia map).
20The purpose of these adaptations was to make Mughal India and Algonquian Tsenacomacah legible. However, hybridisation and epistemic encounter in cartographic form could also give way to confusions. Ambiguity shrouds the territorial boundaries of Mughal India and the nomenclature of the region, with various names (India, the Mughal Empire and Hindustan) being given to the same geographical entity, for example. In the travel compendium Purchas his Pilgrimes, the maps’ titles in the cartographic index reflect that confusion in terms, with India, the Mughal Empire and the East Indies appearing as distinct entities.
21The material or even symbolic gains afforded by these re-framings were not necessarily immediate or visible. The English were seemingly aware of their marginal position and small weight in the south Asian world in particular. In the context of Britain’s early direct and sustained contacts with India, cartography could contribute to deploy “compensatory strategies to deal with Europe’s marginalization” (Markley 3). Hence, despite an imperative of “authenticity” hinging on the empirical collection of first-hand (or at least minimally mediated) sources, the British expressed ambivalent feelings towards these sources.
22In most cases, the British distrusted their Iberian and Dutch rivals, but also some of their own eyewitnesses as well as their indigenous interlocutors, especially in Tsenacomacah. The accounts “had by information of the Savages” were deemed valuable enough to be integrated as provisional gap-fillers in the fragmentary view offered by the British map. That transfer nevertheless came with caveats, with the maps remaining ambiguous about the epistemological status and value of the information obtained “by relation,” especially in colonial Virginia. Beyond the cautious framing of what lies beyond the Maltese crosses on the Virginia map, hints of that relative defiance towards local but mediated knowledge can be found in the terminology used to characterise individual sources of knowledge. Indeed, Algonquian people are referred to as “savages” at key moments in the British narratives, including in the parts devoted to indigenous “relations” of a geographical nature. John Smith thus recounts how “in a little Ile foure or fiue sauages came vnto vs which described vnto vs the course of the Riuer” (A True Relation A3v). The use of that derogatory term, which was not systematically employed by Smith and others at the time, could have implied cautiousness regarding the validity of these descriptions.
23The caveat about what was acquired “by relation” is a curious one when compared with other uses of the phrase in similar contexts. The semantic blur and epistemological uncertainty surrounding the term “relation” in connection to indigenous sources stand in sharp contrast with the assumptions underpinning its use in most British promotional writings. In such titles as John Smith’s True Relation (1608), or John Rolfe’s True Relation of the State of Virginia (1616), the term (as with synonyms such as “report” or “discourse” elsewhere in literature about Virginia) appears frequently in titles of texts presented as unmediated “presentations” of distant lands, rather than mediated representations of space. When of indigenous origin, “relation” denotes mediacy and encourages caution, perhaps because of the identity of those who provided it.
24Some distrust stemmed from racial prejudice and religious difference in Asia, but the reliability of Indian knowledge about Indian geography is questioned neither by Baffin and Roe’s map nor by the accounts associated with it. On the contrary, Baffin and Roe’s cartographic account reflects the Britons’ awareness of their unsurmountable marginality in that part of the world. Unlike contemporary maps of colonial Virginia, for instance, maps of Mughal India are not stamped with English heraldry and political symbolism. Similarly, English trajectories within that space are dwarfed by the more visually prominent “Longe Walke” connecting Agra to Lahore, a route which was culturally significant to Mughals. The dotted lines symbolising Thomas Roe’s journey are by contrast hardly discernible.
25Instead, the map discreetly re-centres English epistemology and claims authority over that derivative product. That much appears in the map’s display of the instruments (such as the scale and compass) which may have been used to design and structure it mathematically. A similar display of instruments can be observed on Smith and Hole’s Virginia map. It is likely that these instruments and the map’s mathematical structure reflected the possible perception that indigenous sources were not always reliable, or at least that they were insufficient. Those visual displays of the map-making process ultimately cast these documents as English sources, despite the indigenous strata of the maps’ contents.
- 17 See for instance Ayesha Ramachandran’s chapter on “A War of Worlds: Becoming ‘Early Modern’ and the (...)
26In Mughal India, the East India Company’s employees found themselves in a literate culture, which meant that writing could not be considered an advantage for the British. As Ogborn points out, “writing’s power and value were therefore widely understood, used, and valued in Indian civil society as well as by the state” (18). Anglo-Mughal encounters also revealed that the two cultures used commensurable visual languages despite their formal differences, even as far as cartography was concerned. Paintings produced by court artists during Jahangir’s reign – such as Abu’l Hasan’s portrait of the Mughal emperor embracing Shah Abbas (from Persia) on a globe centred on South Asia – even suggested that Mughals were not impervious to maps’ symbolic potential.17 Yet, although maps and globes were, to a degree, prized at the Mughal Court, these objects remained a rarity in seventeenth-century India. In fact, scholars have even wondered at the “paucity of the indigenous cartographic archive” in Mughal India, as the literary scholar Ayesha Ramachandran phrased it (Porter 18). In that sense, Britons probably considered that they were filling a gap in the cartographic archive, and despite the relative commensurability of world-making in British, Algonquian and Mughal traditions in representing space, British mapmakers ultimately claimed the final product as their own.
- 18 On non-scriptural and ephemeral forms of indigenous mapping in the early modern period, see Malcolm (...)
27In North America, British colonists had indigenous people draw maps for them, but usually failed to mention these sources when it came to designing maps inspired by those mappings, because their mention was deemed either irrelevant or inconvenient. Furthermore, the “plots” and maps drawn for the benefit of British explorers and mapmakers were not even recorded as maps, perhaps because of their structural and formal differences.18 Strikingly, in the two narratives about British colonists’ exploratory forays in May 1607 cited earlier, the word “map” (or synonyms then in use, such as “plot”) is not used to describe the form which indigenous informants gave to their visual geographical “descriptions” of the region. Other objects now considered cartographic were also then overlooked by Britons. The contemporary map on the back of a Powhatan mantle embroidered with shells forming cosmographic patterns, for example, is nowhere cited as a cartographic source in colonists’ narratives, and is now kept as a non-cartographic artefact at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Instead, indigenous maps used by the English focused on the practical identification of existing settlements, or stressed the ritualistic aspect of the mapping process, mostly ignoring or deriding the cosmological meaning and epistemic significance of those representations.
28In the Generall Historie of Virginia, New Englande and the Summer Iles (1624), Smith explains that during his captivity in 1607, he witnessed a “conjuration” during which, “at the end of every song and Oration, they layd downe a sticke betwixt the divisions of Corne” (1:100). Smith recognises the geographical nature of the display, as the “circle of meale signified their Country, the circles of corne the bounds of the Sea, and the stickes his Country,” but dismisses Algonquian cosmologies underpinning those displays as irrational delusions, deriding the fact that they “imagine the world to be flat and round, like a trencher,” a kind of platter on which food would be served, “and they in the middest” (1:100). Unlike his Algonquian counterparts, Smith purported to offer a detailed “scientific” image dissociated from spiritual performances and free of ethnocentric views, a purpose which the regional scope of his mappings facilitated. One such performance is visualised in the framing vignettes of the later “Ould Virginia” cartographic plate published in The Generall Historie, with still no acknowledgement of a map being produced in that context, even though the respective meaning of the map and ceremony were co-dependent. Such indigenous cartographic performances were described as curiosities whose occult (rather than epistemic) dimension was emphasised in texts and images. In sum, British colonists readily absorbed geographical data pertaining to the region’s various locations, but discarded the forms in which they were expressed, as well as indigenous cosmologies, cosmographies, cosmogonies, and worldviews more broadly.
- 19 Here, by “Indian,” Harley means Algonquian.
29Indigenous presence (mostly in the form of the dense network of settlements) and the fruits of local geographical knowledge garnered by the British settlers are very much visible on Smith and Hole’s map of Virginia. Indigenous contributions, though acknowledged in narratives relating to the expeditions of colonists, are not clearly signposted as such on a visual level. When gazing upon the map, it is difficult for readers to disentangle the threads of various origins which the cartographic images synthesise. While indigenous place-names can easily be recognised as contributions to the map, other elements such as the names of rivers described by the Paspaheghs to Smith’s party of explorers in 1607 represent invisible contributions to the map. Indeed, as geographical knowledge is translated into a visual map, the mediation processes behind its making are obscured, with the end result hardly being presented as deriving from non-English and even non-European sources. It is in that sense that Smith and Hole “disguise a hidden stratum of Indian geographical knowledge” (Harley 171).19
- 20 On cartographic semiotics and standardisation in the early modern era, see Lynam, chapter 1, “The C (...)
30The very design of the maps made with specifically English (or at least European) semiotic encoding effects a symbolic appropriation or familiarisation of foreign locations. Indeed, the map does not only translate words, but also adapts indigenous contents to fit English representational systems. Although the semiotics of cartography were not quite standardised in early modern England, cartographers did share common symbols which became increasingly homogenised, and which would have been familiar to English map-readers.20 On Baffin and Roe’s map of India, for example, such established signs included the aggregated stylised buildings representing urban settlements and strings or clusters of sugar loaves for mountainous terrain. In addition, the ornamental frames used for the cartouches and the overall map itself equally structure the final cartographic document as a product of English knowledge, experience and craftsmanship, so that the map may ultimately be read as English and so that it might fit nicely in the English cartographic corpus and archive.
Fig. 4: Thomas Roe’s journey
William Baffin and Thomas Roe’s map of East India in A Description of East India Conteyning th’Empire of the Great Mogoll (1619) – detail. The journey is symbolised by a double row of dotted lines starting near Surat, where Roe first arrived in 1615, to the imperial court in Agra, before returning in a loop back to “Cambay”
Credits: The British Library
Smith and Roe’s maps enact a visual re-encoding of foreign spaces as English and domesticated (in an etymological sense) representations of these spaces. The map’s contents and scope, for instance, betray a distinctly English experience. Roe’s mapping thus records the East India Company envoy’s itinerary carved across the Mughal empire (fig. 4), whereas Smith’s Virginia map reflects the extent of the English explorer’s travels. More implicitly, the map’s form and orientation could also be reflective of an English perspective on those distant lands. With the west at the top, Smith and Hole’s map of Virginia mirrors the ingress of the Virginia Company’s ships and explorers arriving from Britain across the Atlantic into the Chesapeake Bay. Contents-wise, the topographic data which the map also lays stress on (sylvan resources for the production of timber, for instance) also points to a reframing of indigenous intelligence as a visual catalogue of commodities for future English use. Similarly, Baffin and Roe’s visual record of Mughal geography displays a significant emphasis on the subcontinent’s coastal towns where the East India Company based most of its early operations, and which Roe saw as useful footholds for profits “[sought] at sea and in quiet trade” in a letter to the East India Company in November 1616 (Foster, Embassy 1:344).
31With both Smith and Roe’s mappings, local sources of authority are downplayed in the process. Despite the inclusion of a conspicuous imperial seal on the right, Roe’s map of Mughal India – a thriving and expanding empire spreading across thousands of miles – visually downsizes, in the title cartouche, the “Great Mogoll” who becomes typographically and by extension symbolically secondary to the English cartographic product itself, the “description” (fig. 5).
Fig. 5: William Baffin and Thomas Roe’s map of East India: title cartouche
William Baffin and Thomas Roe’s map of East India in A Description of East India Conteyning th’Empire of the Great Mogoll (1619) – detail
Credits: The British Library
32As for Smith and Hole’s rendering of Tsenacomacah, indigenous people are on the same visual level as topographic features and resources, even appearing in the list of “things” recorded by the English alongside game, trees and rivers, rather than as co-authors or sources of knowledge. In that sense, Algonquian people remain “on the map rather than in it,” as Jess Edwards observes (217). Building on Edwards’ comment, I would also suggest that Algonquian informants were on the map as opposed to behind it as sources and co-conceptors. Although other contemporary English-made maps and atlases – such as John Speed’s Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain (1612) and A Prospect of the Most Famous Parts of the World (1627) – famously appended to their maps exhaustive lists of their sources as evidence of their erudition and reliability, indigenous sources remain unacknowledged in the paratext of Smith’s map. None of Smith’s interlocutors is nominally credited for helping in the map’s production at any point, indigenous contributions being jumbled in the vague mention of parts of the map’s contents having been mediated “by relation.”
33Furthermore, on Smith and Roe’s maps, authorship is officially shared between the map’s designer (John Smith or Thomas Roe) and the artist responsible for the drawing and engraving of the document (“William Baffin delinauit et excudebat” and “Renold Elstrack sculp:” on the “Description of East India”). As a result, both contents and form end up being ascribed to the talents of an English individual. The maps thereby embody an epistemic paradox as they are built on the premise of indigenous people’s authority in describing their lands, while also depriving them of cartographic authorship, effecting a transfer of that authority to the English who translated those geographical facts into a cartographic image. As a result, the English maps of East India and Virginia generate a curious reversal of the language of the alien and the familiar, casting the local populations of those lands as “discovered” foreigners in their own land. Rather than sources of knowledge about these places, they emerge through the map as objects of a scientific inquiry carried out by English observers.
34Despite the cartographers’ reliance on indigenous sources for their maps, places like “Virginia” and “East India” ultimately emerged in English discourse “as objects of colonial knowledge and practice,” or at least as models of pre-imperial knowledge (Raman 3). Indeed, though they were originally designed to simply synthesise English geographical knowledge about these locations, in the long run such cartographic practices came to generate colonial space itself. In that sense, English-made maps of Virginia and East India were maps of English Virginia and pre-English India. These maps came to be constitutive of an English archive about India, as opposed to an Indian archive about India. In that respect, the immediate lives and afterlives of the maps under study in this article, and the discursive framing of their prints and reprints over the years following their conception, shed light on the process by which the English attempted to constitute their own proto-imperial archive. The publication of compilations of English experience and reports such as Richard Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations (1599) and Samuel Purchas’ later Purchas his Pilgrimes (1625) exemplify this.
35The Baffin and Roe map was integrated into England’s early global archive a few years after the map’s initial publication in 1619. The map is listed in the index of the compilation of English achievements in Purchas his Pilgrimes as “The Map and description of the seuerall Kingdomes and Prouinces subiect to the Great Mogoll” (578). In that volume, the map is presented explicitly neither as English nor as Indian, but is incorporated into an English narrative about English presence overseas. As most maps printed in Purchas his Pilgrimes were attributed to the renowned Flemish-Dutch mapmaker Jodocus Hondius, the volume’s author expressed pride in presenting English maps designed respectively by Thomas Roe and John Smith. The very format of these reprints corroborates this importance given to non-derivative English maps building on local knowledge, with Smith’s Map of Virginia and Roe’s Description of East India being the only cartographic illustrations not to be squeezed into the body of the text, but spreading instead across entire folded pages. Within those travel compendia, the English maps did not solely show distant locations, but put them on display. Comparing Baffin and Roe’s illustrative Indian seals with other occurrences of those symbols in Purchas his Pilgrimes, where the map was reprinted, and with the illustrative “forme of Indian writing,” points to the reifying approach to these details offered to the reader as curiosities worth beholding for their strange attractive forms, rather than for their meaning (Purchas 1:343).
- 21 “I presented this Discourse with the Map, to our most gracious Prince Charles, humbly intreating hi (...)
36In colonial Virginia, beyond the “mere” epistemic marginalisation effected by English maps, indigenous geography was gradually erased in the English archive, especially through cartographic recording. King James’s son, Prince Charles, was notably encouraged by John Smith to replace the “Barbarous names for such English” terms with the name “Virginia” itself, completely supplanting existing endonyms for the region, while a wide range of locations and topographic features were also renamed.21 By 1624, the numerous existing settlements and the indigenous strata of knowledge, which still appeared in the 1612 Virginia map, became part of an invisible epistemic pre-history in the “Ould Virginia” cartographic plate. Its vignettes framing the maps show acute antagonism between the Algonquians and the English colonists, which left little room for further cartographic collaboration.
37This collection of local geographical knowledge was, in that context, a one-way process. Thomas Roe, for instance, barely left a trace in official as well as unofficial Mughal records, though he boasts in his journals of a privileged relationship with Emperor Jahangir. The silence in Mughal archival records is eloquent, reflecting the then peripheral position and insignificant weight of Britain in the Asian world.
38In North America, the Algonquians showed no interest in delineating fixed boundaries and mapping them on paper. Unlike the English intruders, they did not map space to offer an exhaustive visual compendium of observable phenomena, mostly relying on maps as mnemonic devices, according to Malcolm G. Lewis (178). The English filled a void there in the sense that they did not seek to show the same objects in the same way. The incommensurability of English and Algonquian mapping practices at that point eluded the English who mostly discarded indigenous maps as rudimentary sketches they could use for practical wayfinding rather than as models for a lasting and comprehensive scientific image of regional or global space.
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39The abundant archive which the short-lived Virginia Company and the more successful East India Company left behind testifies to the ambition of mastering foreign spaces by recording and transmitting knowledge about them in a way which flattered English worldviews and practices. However, the East India Company was initially slow to seize opportunities, while the Virginia Company proved unsuccessful and was dissolved less than two decades after it was chartered. The maps studied in this paper were experimental initiatives led by individuals who travelled to “Virginia” and “East India,” the first in a long line of English imperial maps of foreign lands.
40Yet, at a time when the English were trying to find their place in Asian networks of trade and sites of colonial settlement in North America, maps boasting a solid epistemic basis rooted in authentic data collected locally, represented a strategic advantage both on the ground and in Europe. Since Britons were also lagging behind the Iberians and the Dutch in terms of cartographic production, these two maps simultaneously signalled that the British were gaining a potentially permanent foothold in these charted spaces and that British cartographies could become new European authorities in that field as a result. By reframing in familiar European semiotics the fruits of those methods inspired by rising empirical ideals, the British could stake strong imperialistic and epistemic claims abroad. Consequently, European rivals in both the Old World and the New World recognised this expanding British presence overseas, and acknowledged the quality of the maps examined in this article. In the wake of their publication, renowned cartographers from the Low Countries and France, for instance, copied and borrowed from Smith and Hole’s map of Virginia, and Baffin and Roe’s map of East India. In the longer term, these early mappings building on sound geographical and geopolitical intelligence furnished the British with the tools with which they could carve an empire. Having mastered the secrets of local rule and topography (however partially), the British could indeed begin to reframe and reshape those directly on the ground.