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

For D. Graham Burnett and Felix Driver, maps not only describe space; they make it. They not only image the world elsewhere, but also delineate the contours of colonial desire, recording the relentless drive to master the land and fix it in charts and plans. For both authors, maps and mapmaking lie at the very center of the Victorian engagement with the unknown.

For Burnett, no place better exemplifies the power and peril of maps than British Guiana, a site of British territorial desire since Walter Ralegh's doomed quest for El Dorado in the sixteenth century. By the nineteenth century, it had become an important colonial foothold in South America. What British control had never settled, however, was the colony's territorial limit—a geographical uncertainty that even today leaves the borders of modern Guyana mired in international dispute. Through an exhaustive analysis of primary sources in British and South American archives, Burnett reconstructs, if ultimately to subvert, the process through which the colony was "fixed" on nineteenth- century maps. He focuses on Robert Schomburgk, a naturalized British citizen whose geographical exploits in the service of the Royal Geographical Society linked him inextricably to the history of the colony. Schomburgk arrived in Guiana in the 1830s with the aim of conducting a grand scientific survey in the model of his great precursor Alexander von Humboldt. But as Burnett shows, Schomburgk's scholarly ambitions soon dwindled before the political expediency of colonial politics, with its need for hard facts and enforceable boundaries. Schomburgk found himself recruited to the more prosaic though, it turns out, equally daunting task of establishing the borders of the colony itself.

Burnett brilliantly explores the technologies of nineteenth-century mapping, particularly the paradox of the "traverse survey," a nomadic trek through little-known territory that depended on the ability to identify landmarks and pin them down on maps. Subsequent pictorial and narrative representations of these sites were designed to saturate them with meaning, transforming them into signposts of colonial possession. The paradox lies in the tension between the boundary-making identity of the colonial surveyor and the boundary-crossing identity of the geographical explorer, who could not lay claim to having "discovered" terrae incognitae unless he had crossed over and violated his own or other travelers' boundaries. The problem, as Burnett sees it, was the conflation of these identities in a single individual. The investigation of these conflicting roles—and the conflicts they engendered—shapes the entire argument. Burnett makes his case through close readings of Schomburgk's published and unpublished works, related pictorial representations, and maps themselves, which he submits to rigorous historical and semiotic analysis. Maps emerge in Burnett's hands as deeply entangled and conflictual representations of the traveler's lived experience on the ground—his struggles with the land and with instruments, his fears and ambitions, his dealings with colonial bureaucrats and indigenous bearers, his relationship to prior maps and earlier explorers.

Schomburgk's journey played out in Ralegh's shadow, and in relation to his maps, however imperfect they might have been. He both drew on his predecessor's authority and stripped it of geographical content. As Burnett puts it, "Ralegh legitimizes Schomburgk; Schomburgk exculpates and restores Ralegh. Schomburgk walks Ralegh's path, but Ralegh walks on Schomburgk's map" (39). Burnett, in one of several turns to classical rhetoric, calls this process "metalepsis," a trope he frequently explains by means of his own preferred, if sometimes overused, device: the chiasmus, as in the quote above. Burnett ignores, however, the strong oedipal overtones of metalepsis, as he does the work of Walter Jackson Bate...