Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado (review)

Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado. By D. Graham Burnett. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Pp. xv+298. $45.

Boundary disputes are like scientific controversies. Until they are resolved they allow "nonobjective" factors--political, historical, sociological, philosophical, and ideological--to take precedence over what later give the appearance of facts, that is, recognized boundaries delineated on maps in the one case and scientific truth proclaimed in textbooks in the other. During the nineteenth century, the territory that is now the Republic of Guyana, and was then British Guiana--on the northeast coast of South America--was the scene of recurrent boundary disputes, mainly between Great Britain and Venezuela. A central figure in those disputes during the 1830s and 1840s was the explorer, surveyor, and cartographer Robert Schomburgk, and this book is an account of his career and exploits in the service of Great Britain.

Masters of All They Surveyed is based on D. Graham Burnett's dissertation, and the formidable density of detail confirms its provenance and calls for some perseverance on the part of the reader. In straining for interpretative significance, Burnett has employed an approach that is vying for center stage in the history of science. He makes a case for the "construction" of the colony, parallel to the way scientific thought is said to be constructed sociologically. Instead of the realistic factors, political and economic, that generally agitate adversaries in boundary disputes, Burnett emphasizes the role of myth in the construction of the colony, specifically the myth of El Dorado, the fabled land of gold that since the sixteenth century was believed by some to be somewhere in South America: "Myths overwrote terra incognita with significance" (p. 14).

But on the question of how much significance, Burnett is agnostic: "it would be impossible to argue that considerations of myth and history drove the process entirely . . . it would be equally wrong to overlook their significance altogether" (p. 47). A reader less taken with the new approaches in the history of science than Burnett may be curious about geopolitical considerations and even more so about the economic resources, actual and potential, that fueled the disputes. The replacement of Marx by myth cannot be so easily accomplished, especially since there is good reason to believe (and Burnett alludes to the point occasionally) that Schomburgk's masters in London were realists, not fantasists. They valued the colony for its wealth and they surely hoped for more of it.

In fact, during the nineteenth century the territory was valuable for its sugar plantations, and in the twentieth it has become a major producer of bauxite. (Guyana was one of the seven charter members of the International Association of Producers of Bauxite.) Those realists in London had more on their minds than the myth of El Dorado. In his concluding chapter Burnett discusses the political and economic implications of the boundary disputes for present-day Guyana and its future. If this discussion had been placed up front, it might have provided a better context for Schomburgk's exploits. But then it would have stolen the limelight from El Dorado.

Burnett has some interesting things to say about how the many uncertainties of surveying and cartography played a role in the disputes, and readers interested in the history of cartography will be rewarded with some sharp insights. Indeed, he states that such readers will be among his book's main beneficiaries: "If you are curious about how a soft-footed European gentleman, predisposed to seasickness (and unable to swim), made his way through thick jungles, arid savannas, and forbidding mountain ranges for the better part of a decade and emerged with a map that could be waved about among diplomats and military men in the metropolis, then this is the book for you" (p. xii).

The book is graced with eighteen splendid color illustrations. Burnett might have toned...