Mapping and the European Search for Intercultural Alliances in the Colonial World

When Richard Hakluyt the younger published Divers voyages touching the discouerie of America in 1582, he included works written originally for other enterprises. One such tract was a set of instructions sent by the merchants of the Muscovy Company with two of their employees on an expedition to find a northeast passage. Hakluyt thought the Muscovy Company's advice was useful for "other enterprises of discouerie" and appropriate for those who would explore and colonize North America. In their instructions, the Muscovy Company's merchants were very specific about the kinds of goods and behaviors most likely to impress persons of credit whom the expedition might meet. The merchants' list of goods included most commodities important to late sixteenth-century European trade, with emphasis on goods produced in England. However, two of the items the merchants thought were certain to impress seem more surprising. In addition to cloth, shoes, gloves, and English glass, they urged their men to take maps, and the merchants had very clear ideas about which maps would make the best impression. They wanted to send maps that represented the territory, wealth, and market power of the English kingdom. For these merchants, the visual images on maps could be particularly useful in intercultural contacts where pictorial images, material goods, and gesture could be more important than words.¹

Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century maps seem inaccurate to audiences informed by the framework of modern western scientific geography. Yet early modern maps were neither merely stepping stones in an ongoing quest for knowledge, nor were they simply the product of ignorance, however much they differ from current geographical and geopolitical perceptions. Mapping allowed people to imagine geopolitical relationships and aspirations, and they were integrally linked to practical attempts to establish intercultural alliances. Mapmaking, cartographical principles, and related concepts and skills from navigation formed the foundation of early modern Europeans' quest to establish trade and military alliances with native peoples during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Early modern Europeans were particularly fascinated with maps and mapping. They drew secret maps by hand and carefully protected the knowledge of lucrative trade routes and strategic military outposts that such maps represented. Increasingly, changes in navigation, mathematics, and the use of perspective helped to create a rapidly growing European market for maps, and an increasing number and array of maps became readily available in European markets.² As changes in print and cartographic technologies greatly increased Europeans' familiarity with mapping concepts and navigation techniques, Europeans extended the language and concepts from mapping and navigation and applied them to political and cultural relationships. When European colonial sponsors and explorers worked to map the earth and its waterways, they sought also to map the peoples and social problems of the world. Early modern Europeans saw mapping and navigation as parts of a larger whole, and both were explicitly connected to colonialism.

In this context, maps as well as geography and navigation materials performed a similar function to colonial travel accounts and promotional literature. Indeed, they were complementary materials and were read as such by European readers. One of the purposes of this material was to work out all possible connections between the world's various peoples. Some of the most famous compilers of travel narratives and ethnographic descriptions of new lands and peoples drew out these connections explicitly. The English colonial promoter Richard Hakluyt and the Dutch colonial promoter Johann De Laet, for instance, both sought to pinpoint how different nations were related: religiously, linguistically, culturally, and diplomatically. This too was a kind of mapping, and as part of it, colonial promoters like Hakluyt were explicitly interested in laying out the enemies and allies of new peoples whom Europeans encountered. Alliances were an integral part of the context of mapping in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and vice versa. Moreover, maps themselves often specifically focused on the importance of intercultural alliances by specifying where different peoples lived, who and where their allies and enemies were. This was as true of mapping enterprises in North America as elsewhere.

The European colonial ventures...