Cartographic Encounters: Indigenous People and the Exploration of the New World (review)

In his latest book John Short explores the roles of indigenous peoples in the exploration and mapping of the New World. In doing so, he interprets "cartographic encounters" more broadly than do previous works, such as Malcolm Lewis' Cartographic encounters: perspectives on Native American mapmaking and map use (1998). Instead of focusing on the specific role of map-making or cartographic interpretation, Short analyzes the encounter narratives themselves for evidence of indigenous cartographic contributions to exploration. He proposes that a closer (postmodern) re-reading of these narratives reveals that the explorers were more dependent on information gained from indigenous peoples than has been popularly recognized. By highlighting their contributions, Short attempts to dispel what he calls the myths of discovery and exploration, which tend to glorify the 'discovery' of the New World by the Europeans. He writes, "The image of the lone, western hero exploring virgin territory is so far off the mark as to be laughable" (p. 127).

At a well-illustrated 176 pages, the book flows quickly. After laying out the previous argument in chapters one and two, chapters three and four explicate colonial narratives to show primarily that native peoples were already there, and that the information they provided enabled the eventual cartographic rendering of the land. This hidden stratum of cartographic information, Short maintains, is only now being excavated and recognized as having been a vital part of European and later, American exploration. He demonstrates that the information exchange was invaluable to the newcomers, and although it proved useful to native groups over the short to medium terms, over the long term it sealed the fate of indigenous society. Chapters five, six, and seven demonstrate the more active imperialist role of the explorers and retell the Lewis and Clark and Freemont expeditions and surveys from this perspective. In these chapters Short describes how the rational emphasis on science and nationalism, measurement and appropriation ignored, downplayed, or miscast the roles played by indigenous peoples. Chapter eight provides perhaps the most insightful re-reading of the cartographic encounters, describing the explorations, military exercises, and surveys that led to Warren's Map (p. 109), again focusing on passages that reflect the contributions of native peoples.

Within these chapters, Short scours the narratives (journal entries) of the explorers to excavate the names of indigenous contributors long forgotten, and to expose these and even later representations as manufactured and biased. This involved the "conscious removal of the Native American contribution" (pp. 128-132), although the exact degree and overall pervasiveness of this phenomenon is difficult to determine from the analysis. Furthermore, when details of native contributions are in fact present in the original narratives they are either downplayed as insufficient or used as benchmarks from which later distortions of the actual contributions are judged. Still later representations, Short believes, purposefully misrepresent the true contributions of indigenous peoples, which he gleans from a postmodern re-reading of the original narratives – narratives that he already purported to be biased, or flawed.

Logically, this is a complicated process, and while the book may be appealingly concise in its conclusions, the methods do not always seem logically clear. On the surface, it seems the diversity of exploration narratives, along with the inherent complexities of perspective in postmodern scholarship, would preclude any blanket generalizations concerning New World cartographic encounters, the motivations of the explorers, or the processes of cultural change that followed.

At first glance, the book's focus on cartographic encounters in the New World may sound appealing to Latin Americanist geographers, but it only marginally considers Latin Americas and only briefly makes reference to pre-Hispanic maps, codices and khipus in Chapter 2. This general neglect of Latin America may puzzle readers of New World historical geography or cartographic history, and the reasons for this omission are difficult to determine since it is not clearly addressed in the book. It may...