Mapping Nature across the Americas

By James R. Akerman

Maps are inherently unnatural. Projecting three-dimensional realities onto two-dimensional surfaces, they are abstractions that capture someone’s idea of what matters within a particular place; they require selections and omissions. These very characteristics, however, give maps their importance for understanding how humans have interacted with the natural world, and give historical maps, especially, the power to provide rich insights into the relationship between humans and nature over time. That is just what is achieved in Mapping Nature across the Americas. Illustrated throughout, the essays in this book argue for greater analysis of historical maps in the field of environmental history, and for greater attention within the field of the history of cartography to the cultural constructions of nature contained within maps. This volume thus provides the first in-depth and interdisciplinary investigation of the relationship between maps and environmental knowledge in the Americas—including, for example, stories of indigenous cartography in Mexico, the allegorical presence of palm trees in maps of Argentina, the systemic mapping of US forests, and the scientific platting of Canada’s remote lands.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Oct 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9780226696577

Book preview

Cover Page for Mapping Nature across the Americas

MAPPING NATURE ACROSS THE AMERICAS

MAPPING NATURE ACROSS THE AMERICAS

EDITED BY Kathleen A. Brosnan and James R. Akerman

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2021 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2021

Printed in the United States of America

29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20     1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-69643-0 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-69657-7 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226696577.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Brosnan, Kathleen A., 1960– editor. | Akerman, James R., editor.

Title: Mapping nature across the Americas / edited by Kathleen A. Brosnan, James R. Akerman.

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020056574 | ISBN 9780226696430 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226696577 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Cartography—America—History. | Physical geography—America—Maps—History. | America—Maps—History.

Classification: LCC GA401 .M36 2021 | DDC 526.097—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020056574

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Introduction

Kathleen A. Brosnan and James R. Akerman

PART ONE: PEOPLE’S NATURE

CHAPTER 1 · Staking Claims on Native Lands: The Symbolic Power of Indigenous Cartographic Conventions in the Ayer Map of Teotihuacan Mexico (1560) and Its Copies

Jennifer Saracino

CHAPTER 2 · Into the Interior: Reading the Native Landscape of the Great Lakes in European Maps, 1612–1755

Kelly Hopkins

CHAPTER 3 · Currents of Influence: Indigenous River Names in the American South

Craig E. Colten

CHAPTER 4 · Oysters and Emancipation: The Antebellum Shellfish Industry as a Pathway to Freedom

Michelle Zacks

PART TWO: REINVENTORS’ NATURE

CHAPTER 5 · Transcending the Alps in the Andes: Charles Marie de La Condamine, Pierre Bouguer, and the Graphic Invention of the Mountain Range

Ernesto Capello

CHAPTER 6 · On the Trail with Humboldt: Mapping the Orinoco as Transnational Space

Adriana Méndez Rodenas

CHAPTER 7 · Palms and Other Trees on Maps: Exoticism, Error, and Environment, from Old World to New

Brian Bockelman

CHAPTER 8 · Beyond the Map: Landscape, History, and the Routes of Cortés

Raymond B. Craib

PART THREE: THE STATE’S NATURE

CHAPTER 9 · Nature Knows No Bounds: Mapping Challenges at the US-Mexico Border

Mary E. Mendoza

CHAPTER 10 · Visualizing the Enlarged Homestead Act: Mapping Power and Place in Early Twentieth-Century US Land Policy

Sara M. Gregg

CHAPTER 11 · Mapping Canadian Nature and the Nature of Canadian Mapping

Matt Dyce and Graeme Wynn

CHAPTER 12 · Seeing Forests as Systems: Maps of North American Forest Conditions and the Emergence of Visual-Ecological Thinking

Peter Nekola

EPILOGUE · The View from across the Pond

Catherine T. Dunlop

Acknowledgments

APPENDIX · Critical Map Reading for the Environment

List of Contributors

Notes

Index

Color Gallery

ILLUSTRATIONS

0.1   Mapa Siguenza (Nahuatl glyph map of Aztec migration from Aztlan to Tenochtitlán), sixteenth century; c. 1830 ms copy

0.2   Cross section of the volcano Chimborazo, Ecuador, published by Alexander von Humboldt in the Geographie des plantes equinoxiales, in his volume Essai sur la geographie

0.3   John Gardiner, Map of the Bounty Lands, Illinois (Washington: General Land Office, 1818)

1.1   Reproduction of lost Mazapan map of unknown provenience, original c. eighteenth or nineteenth century, from José María Arreola, Códices y documentos en mexicano, in M. Gamio, ed., La población del Valle de Teotihuacan (Mexico City: Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1922)

1.2   Legend of glosses in the reproduction of the lost Mazapan map of unknown provenance, original c. eighteenth or nineteenth century, from José María Arreola, Códices y documentos en mexicano, in M. Gamio, ed., La población del Valle de Teotihuacan (Mexico City: Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1922)

1.3   Tenochtitlán in the Codex Mendoza, c. 1541

2.1   Samuel de Champlain, Carte Geographique de la Nouvelle France (Paris, 1612)

2.2   Samuel de Champlain, Carte de la Nouvelle France (Paris, 1632)

2.3   A Mappe of Colonel Römer’s Voyage to ye: 5 Indian Nations, 1700

2.4   Detail of the Great Lakes region, John Mitchell, A Map of the British and French Dominions in North America (London, 1755)

2.5   Title cartouche, John Mitchell, A Map of the British and French Dominions in North America (London, 1755)

3.1   Detail, John Smith, Virginia (London, 1624)

3.2   Detail of Carolina and Florida coast, Pieter van der Aa, Zee en Land Togten der Franszen Gedaan na, en in’t Americaans Gewest van Florida, allereerst door Ioh, Pontius Ontdekt (Leiden, 1706)

3.3   Detail, Joseph Francisco Badaraco and Juan Linares, Plano. I descripcion de la costa, desde el Cavo Cañaveral, hasta cerca de la boca de la Vir[ g]inia, contando, costa de Florida, Georgia y Carolinas del S, y N (1756)

3.4   Jean Baptiste Liébaux after Jacques Marquette, Carte de la decouverte faite l’an 1673 dans l’Amerique Septentrionale, in Melchisédec Thévenot, Recueil de voyages de Mr. Thevenot (1681?)

3.5   Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville, Carte de la Louisiane (1752)

3.6   Detail, John Mackay and J. E. Blake (US topographic engineers), Map of the Seat of War in Florida (Washington, 1839)

4.1   Survey of the coast of the United States, New York Bay and Harbor and the Environs (Washington, 1845)

4.2   F. H. Gerdes’s sketch of Wade’s Point Signal

4.3   New Haven Harbor, NOAA National Ocean Service (Washington, 1846)

4.4   1862: Coast Chart 33: Chesapeake Bay: From Choptank River to Potomac River

5.1   Detail, Guillaume Sanson, Le Gouvernement General du Dauphine (Paris: Alexis Hubert Jaillot, 1693)

5.2   Carte de la Baye de la Table au Nord du Cap de Bonne Esperance, Cartes marines, early eighteenth century

5.3   Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville, Vue de la Base mesurée dans la plaine de Yarouqui, in Charles-Marie de La Condamine, Journal du voyage fait par ordre du Roi, a l’equateur, servant . . . la mesure de trois premiers degres du méridien (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1751)

5.4   Profile de la cordeliere de Pérou, in Pierre Bouguer, La Figure de la terre: Messieurs Bouguer, & de La Condamine, de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, envoyés par ordre du roy au Pérou, poit observer aux environs de l’Equateur. Avec une relation abregée de ce voyage, qui contient la description du pays dans lequel les operations ont été faites (Paris: Jombert, 1749)

5.5   Carte de la meridienne de Quito, and Coupe du Terrain de la Meridienne de Quito, in Charles-Marie de La Condamine, Mesure des trois premiers degrés du mériden dans l’hémisphere austral (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1751)

6.1   Chute du Tequendama, based on a sketch by Alexander von Humboldt and engraved by Wilhelm Friedrich Gmelin. Vues des Cordillères et monumens des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique (Paris: Chez F. Schoell, 1810–13)

6.2   Samuel Fritz, Plan de la riviere de Maragnon ou de la grande riviere des Amazones, in Cartes marines (early-eighteenth-century copy of the 1707 original)

6.3   Charles-Marie de La Condamine, Carte du Cours de Maragnon ou de la grande riviere des Amazones, in Relation abrégée d’un voyage fait dans l’intérieur de l’Amérique mériodionale (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1745)

6.4   Alexander von Humboldt, Carte itinéraire du cours de l’Orénoque, de l’Atapabo, du Casiaquiare, et du Rio Negro, in Atlas géographique et physique du royaume de la Nouvelle-Espagne (Paris: F. Schoell, 1811)

7.1   Detail of Abraham Ortelius, Typus orbis terrarum, in Theatrum orbis terrarium (Antwerp, 1570)

7.2   Tijpus Freti Magellanici, in Joris van Spilbergen, Speculum orientalis occidentalisque Indiae navigationum (Leiden: Nicolaum à Geelkercken, 1619)

7.3   John Ogilby, Tabula Magellanica, qua Tierrae del Fuego, in America: Being the Latest, and Most Accurate Description of the New World (London, 1671)

7.4   Terra allegory detail on bottom-right border of Hendrik Hondius, Nova totius orbis geographica ac hydrographica tabula (Amsterdam, 1630)

7.5   Detail of South America plant distribution map, from Heinrich Berghaus, Physikalischer Atlas, vol. 1 (Gotha, Germany: Justus Perthes, 1845–48)

8.1   The central corridor between the port of Veracruz and Mexico City, from Vicente Riva Palacio, México a través de los siglos (Barcelona: Espasa y Compañía, editores, 1887)

8.2   Map included in Prescott’s The Conquest of Mexico

8.3   Detail of John Disturnell’s 1847 map showing the road from Veracruz to Mexico City

8.4   Purported route taken by the ancestors of the Aztecs, from Aztlán to the central valley of Mexico, highlighted by García Cubas in Carta Histórica y Arqueológica

8.5   Title page from the first edition of Benítez’s La Ruta de Hernán Cortés

8.6   Landscape from Benítez, La ruta de Hernán Cortés

8.7   Currency issued by the revolutionary government of Venustiana Carranza in 1915

9.1   Extract from the Treaty Map of Disturnell, 1847, Referred to in Col. Graham’s Report, in Report of the Secretary of War, showing disputed territory between the Gray and Bartlett-Condé lines near El Paso

10.1   Department of the Interior, State of Arizona: Lands Designated by the Secretary of the Interior under the Provisions of the Enlarged Homestead Acts, 1916

10.2   Department of the Interior, State of Montana: Lands Designated by the Secretary of the Interior under the Provisions of the Enlarged Homestead Acts, 1910

10.3   Department of the Interior, State of Montana: Lands Designated by the Secretary of the Interior under the Provisions of the Enlarged Homestead Acts, 1916

11.1   The receding frontier of terra incognita in northern North America, 1670–1870

11.2   Phototopographic mapping in Canada, 1931

11.3   Photographic surveying of irregular terrain using a transit and camera, 1916

11.4   Before and after aerial mapping. From F. H. Peters, Surveying and Mapping in Canada, Empire Survey Review 1, no. 2 (October 1931)

11.5   Canada Land Inventory classification for soils and agriculture, 1965

11.6a–c   Canada Land Inventory of potential for tourism, 1969

11.7   Canada Department of Energy, Mines, and Technical Surveys, 1978

12.1   Section 36, township 40-17, March 7, 1878

Plate 1   Ayer Map of Teotihuacan, 1560

Plate 2   Detail, Nicolas de Fer, L’Amerique (Paris, 1704).

Plate 3   Radeau de la Rivière de Guayaquil, in Alexander von Humboldt, Voyage de Humboldt et Bonpland

Plate 4   Detail showing palm tree on Vercelli mappamundi, c. 1200

Plate 5   Spain and North Africa detail from Roselli 1456 chart, showing green Sierra Nevada and other characteristic portolan illustrations

Plate 6   Lopes portolan atlas, c. 1565: details of North Africa and Brazil

Plate 7   View from the Gulf of Mexico, approaching the port of Veracruz

Plate 8   Wayne Healy and David Botello, Columbus Lands on Las Indias

Plate 9   John Disturnell, Map of the Republic of Mexico, 1847

Plate 10   Department of the Interior map series, areas in red designated by the Secretary of the Interior as nonirrigable, 1916

Plate 11   General Land Office map, United States Including Territories and Insular Possessions, Showing Extent of Public Surveys, Indian, Military, and Forest Reservations, Railroads, Canals, National Parks and Other Details, 1913

Plate 12   Filibert Roth and Bernhard E. Fernow, Forest Conditions of Northern Wisconsin (Washington: US Department of Agriculture, 1897)

Plate 13   White River Plateau Timber Reserve, Showing Distribution of Commercial Timber, Burned Areas, etc., 1898

Plate 14a   Map of Washington Forest Reserve, Showing Wooded, Burned, and Restocked Areas, and the Density of Merchantable Timber, 1897

Plate 14b   Map of Washington Forest Reserve, Showing Distribution of Timber Species, 1897

Plate 15a   John G. Jack, Pikes Peak, Plum Creek, and South Platte Forest Reserves, Showing Density of Forests, US Geological Survey Twentieth Annual Report

Plate 15b   John G. Jack, Pikes Peak, Plum Creek, and South Platte Forest Reserves, Showing Range of Principal Timber Trees, Irrespective of Burned Areas, US Geological Survey Twentieth Annual Report

Plate 15c   John G. Jack, Pikes Peak, Plum Creek, and South Platte Forest Reserves, Showing Burned Areas, US Geological Survey Twentieth Annual Report

Plate 16   Bernhard E. Fernow, Forest Distribution in Nova Scotia, Cape Breton Sheet, in Forest Conditions of Nova Scotia (Ottawa: Commission of Conservation Canada, 1912)

INTRODUCTION

Kathleen A. Brosnan and James R. Akerman

Maps are inherently unnatural. This statement may seem an odd proposition to begin a book that argues for the greater analysis of historical maps in fostering our understanding of the environment. Projecting three-dimensional realities onto two-dimensional surfaces, maps are abstractions that capture someone’s idea of what matters within a particular place. They can never provide a complete inventory of natural elements, but it is in their selections and silences that maps reveal what their makers perceive as important in any given environment. Seemingly static representations of a specific space at a given time, maps also reflect power dynamics and cultural values at the point of their creation and perhaps over time through shifting interpretations. They embody cultural constructions of nature and, in turn, become such constructions. These very characteristics impel us to give historical maps preeminence in examining how humans have interacted with the natural world. Interpreting maps in their historical context, we discover that these cartographic abstractions encapsulated stories about human relations with nature, and about relations between humans vis-à-vis competition for land, water, and other resources—and even for the right to name those resources. Maps also were contingent and aspirational documents, telling us not only what people perceived, but what they hoped to find or create in their experiences with dynamic environments. Thus, mapping constituted a culturally laden depiction of nature and a primary form of engagement with it.

Maps were critical to the ways in which transatlantic cultures imagined the Americas from the first Euro-American contacts. Maps and views mediated the contest for empire and the emergence of new national identities. Geographical imagery shaped evolving ideas about the geography, natural resources, landscapes, and peoples of the Western Hemisphere.¹ These images registered encounters between radically different forms of topographic and historical representation and ways of understanding space and nature. And indigenous peoples, as some of the essays in this book reveal, not only provided European mapmakers with vital information on physical features and natural amenities; many adapted the medium to their own cultural forms to assert land claims. Later modern landscape art, topographical drawing, tourist mapping, and commercial and government cartography shaped imaginations of the landscapes of the Americas and promoted the greater settlement, development, and consumption of resources. In time these representations became more concrete than their makers intended and, for some people, more concrete than the actual environments they proposed to depict.

As Robert Karrow, the former curator of maps at the Newberry Library, observes: "A map . . . [generally] tends to carry an invisible nonfiction label, an implied certification that it is factual and trustworthy. This is especially true when the map meets high standards of design and production."² Nonetheless, mapmakers always have been selective in the facts they present. They have no choice but to make choices. No abstraction, regardless of the level of scientific accuracy, can fully represent all details of a particular space, no matter how large or how small. Mapmakers select which elements to include and which to conceal, and what is hidden—the cartographic silences—is equally important. Empty spaces on maps do not reflect gaps in knowledge. They are positive statements that often involve the deliberate withholding of information.³ Employing maps as forms of rhetoric, their creators targeted specific audiences and invoked authority for their selections, often through science or government.⁴ And with this authority, these abstractions also possess the demonstrable power to organize social energies so as to bring into being the visions of the world they posit.⁵ Thus, it is the mapmakers’ choices that we must interrogate more fully to unearth the constructions of nature contained therein.

This collection of essays is perhaps the first book to fully contemplate historical maps as the primary evidentiary sources in examining the evolution of environmental knowledge in the Americas. Mapping Nature across the Americas emerges in part from a National Endowment for the Humanities–sponsored summer institute, of the same name, for college and university professors at the Newberry Library. The institute brought together the fields of environmental history and history of cartography to illuminate their essential connections and to broaden participants’ appreciation of how maps and depictions of nature shaped and were shaped by diverse cultural and historical contexts. Except for the author of one essay, all contributors were participants or faculty members in the institute. The breadth of the Newberry Library’s collections, well represented in the images herein, allowed us to take a long view of the interplay between mapping and the human-nature relationship over a span of five hundred years, exploring how they coexisted in specific works and contexts to mold ideas about space, landscape, natural history, ethnography, economic exploitation, and politics. At the same time, the interdisciplinary approach of the both the institute and this book stretches comfortable academic boundaries.

One of the most explosive fields of history over the past four decades, environmental history has drawn practitioners from disciplines across the humanities and the social and physical sciences to study the role of nature in the human past. In a series of groundbreaking works, it explains how nature has influenced human life and, in turn, how humans have crafted the environments in which they lived. Environmental history, as Donald Worster argues, rejects the conventional assumption that human experience has been exempt from natural constraints, that people are a separate and ‘supernatural’ species, that the ecological consequences of their past deeds can be ignored.⁶ The field opened the door to a deep, multifaceted examination of the historical relationship between human societies and their environments—in much the same way that the historical study of mapping offers insights into the ways that humans perceive, interact with, and construct the world around them. Environmental historians also consider how nature itself is a construction or, as environmental historian William Cronon styles it, a human idea, with a long and complicated cultural history which has led different human beings to conceive of the natural world in very different ways.⁷

An interdisciplinary field by definition and in practice, environmental history uses a wide array of resources, including those from literature, religious texts, natural history, data on climatic and geological changes, and studies of plant and animal life.⁸ With some notable exceptions, however, when its practitioners have employed maps, they have done so only to provide illustrations or geographic context for other source materials.⁹ Maps are well known but less well understood. . . . Historians have tended to relegate maps—along with paintings, photographs, and other nonverbal sources—to a lower division of evidence than the written word.¹⁰ Historians need greater geographic imagination. All stories take place within spaces, but when historians limit their interpretations of maps, those spaces become static. Environmental historians have played a crucial role in treating dynamic environments as much more than simply the background for human activity. The field must take a similarly strong approach to spatial analysis, making maps foundational texts for studying the role of nature in the human past.

Over the last four decades, historical cartographic scholarship also saw dramatic changes, benefiting significantly as art historians, anthropologists, and literary scholars have appreciated maps as cultural artifacts. Historians of cartography challenged the traditional narrative of their field—the story of the unfolding of the world map, revealed by Western explorers and geographers and enabled by the steady improvement in the accuracy and scientific sophistication of cartographic methods and technologies. The emergence of mathematical surveys for military, hydrographic, and national mapping revolutionized cartography and promoted the notion that mapping was a dispassionate science. Advances in production, especially color prints, allowed mapmakers to include more natural details in more sophisticated ways.¹¹ Yet we now realize that even these new, seemingly objective methods were imbued with cultural values as well as economic and political motivations.¹²

Historians of cartography have tried to peel back the layers of anonymity and objectivity with which many maps have been clothed.¹³ Expressing points of view, they recognized, map are cultural constructions as much as they are products of science. These attempts to model the world were profoundly shaped by prevailing worldviews and the contexts in which they were created. Historical maps, as cartographic historian J. B. Harley observes, illuminate cultural history or the social values of a particular period or place.¹⁴ These shifts in emphasis have pushed map scholars to explore unstudied or understudied aspects of mapping, such as social geography, propaganda, and the relationship between mapping and art. However, cartographic studies have not yet fully delved into the essential, influential, and transformative constructions of nature embodied in these historical artifacts. Living in the Anthropocene, where human activity has been the most dominant influence on climate and the environment, this lack of attention is striking.

Mapping Nature across the Americas, therefore, compels cartographic historians and environmental historians alike to expand their analytical framework and evidentiary foundations, and to contemplate the many faces of spatialized nature that maps present.¹⁵ However static cartographic representations remain on the paper, they retain a dynamism in their creation, interpretation, and influence that mirrors the vitality of human society and the natural world. In provocative essays, our contributors investigate maps as complex sources—as carriers of ideas about nature and as participants in the human history of the environment. The authors discern the tentativeness of the data on which they depend and elucidate the contexts in which they emerged.¹⁶ As Harley notes, Maps do not simply reproduce a topographical reality; they also interpret it. Physical maps mold the more elusive cognitive maps drawn by generations across the Americas, shaping their actual interactions with the natural world.¹⁷ And it is these interpretations and the interactions they spawn that offer fertile ground for the merger of environmental history and the history of cartography. Maps are a means to expand our understanding of the human-nature bond. We seek to understand the undeniable, if sometimes elusive, way of expressing knowledge of, mastery of, and control over the environments they depict.¹⁸ This book reveals that this mastery was often fictive, as the objects, creatures, and landscapes that humans labeled as natural were intertwined with cultural concepts and embedded in the maps used to describe them.

We have adopted a hemispheric approach as we establish the primacy of cartographic evidence in environmental analysis. Concentrating on the Americas sharpens the geographic focus of this volume, providing greater comprehension of how peoples with diverse traditions developed distinctive customs in their encounters with and mapping of nature. As Worster observes, If modern history has a single, fabled point of beginning, it is here with Columbus’s finding of the Americas. They had not been lost, they had simply not existed heretofore in the European mind. Now suddenly there they loomed, all shining with hope and invitation for the new people of power: an array of islands, continents, tropical jungles, a promise of gold and spices and who knew what else . . . ¹⁹ Maps played crucial roles in the ways peoples of the distant hemispheres interacted. Maps facilitated and drove European interventions in the Americas. The advent of the printing press made maps readily multipliable, and stimulated consumption of these geographic representations.²⁰ And while cartography has been seen predominantly through Eurocentric lenses, particularly with respect to the centuries following contact, new cartographic analyses of the last four decades have allowed us to reexamine maps of conquest for the ways in which they appropriated indigenous knowledge or used silences to try to erase an indigenous presence. Moreover, indigenous and enslaved peoples provided environmental knowledge essential to cartographic creation and, over time, adapted and used cartographic forms to their own cultural ends on several occasions.

Our chronological scope emphasizes the historical contingencies of environmental and cartographic knowledge, and their places of merger. Many of the essays contained herein investigate maps from this era of early modern globalization, which the historians J. R. McNeill and William McNeill describe as a painful, sometimes brutal process.²¹ There were major provocations within established religions, through reformations, revivals, and schism. Empiricism challenged traditional science. In politics, revolutions were afoot as monarchies failed or fell. And protocapitalist efforts reshuffled fortunes in favor of merchant classes.²² Maps that underwrote these shifts appeared to be part of an episteme of rationalization, as the historian Elizabeth Sutton observes.²³ In studying historical maps of this era, however, we are reminded of the many possible outcomes that might have followed contact between the earth’s Eastern and Western Hemispheres. Other developments from the scientific revolution—such as the concept of a universe governed by natural laws, or the emergence of natural history grounded in observation and focused on categorization—increasingly influenced mapmakers. Similarly, with the Enlightenment, the notion that societies existed within defined national interests also increasingly took hold. Various factors such as geography, natural features, language, and culture often defined nations.²⁴ Maps and the nature they portrayed played profound roles in these processes, even as those maps or viewers’ assumptions about them camouflaged expressions of political power. As Denis Wood contends, "Defining the map as a representation of part of the earth’s surface naturalizes the map. Naturalizing the map has the effect of universalizing it, and this helps obscure the modern map’s origins in the rise of the state."²⁵

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We have sorted our essays into three sections focused on both those who created the maps and those whose knowledge informed the maps, or whose labor shaped the environments depicted. These categories—the people’s nature, the reinventor’s nature, and the state’s nature—are to some extent arbitrary and nebulous. In reality, a number of themes run through and connect the chapters, such as the economic, cultural, and environmental exchanges embodied within historical maps; the emergence of new scientific cartographic methods to represent space and categorize nature; and the use of maps to establish or reinforce hegemony over people and nature. Via these categories, we do not intend to suggest any chronological progression that elevates the old narrative of an unfolding world map accomplished through cartographic improvements. Our contributors vigilantly reveal the sociopolitical and economic imperatives that have informed and pervaded the maps they study.

To facilitate teaching with this volume, we also identify and define some of the types of maps found in Mapping Nature across the Americas in the following paragraphs. Readers also will find in an appendix a useful guide, Critical Map Reading for the Environment, suitable for their own research needs and appropriate for the introduction of cartographic sources in secondary schools and colleges.

THE PEOPLE’S NATURE

In various ways, the essays in this section illustrate how otherwise marginalized peoples, particularly indigenous societies and enslaved populations, remained a vital presence in the Americas and within maps intended to convey their subjugation or removal. Vibrant peoples working within dynamic environments, these communities shaped and named much of the nature depicted within cartographic spaces. And at times they used the environmental knowledge garnered through their traditions and labor to subvert or escape domination or to claim their place within a new political order. Mapa Sigüenza, for example, appears to constitute an attempt by its makers, most likely the Aztecs, to reassert their history and connection to the land. Fig. 0.1 is a nineteenth-century copy of this late-sixteenth- or early-seventeenth-century map depicting the Aztec conquest of the Valley of Mexico. The migratory story begins in their traditional island home of Aztlän (the green hill in the square), and proceeds to Tenochtitlán (the nopal cactus at the crossed canals). A footprinted path indicates movement across time and space. Entering the valley near Chapultepec (the Hill of the Grasshopper), the map addresses relations between Aztecs and other groups, especially violent conflicts, as well as the retreat into the marshy lake. The history ends with the Aztecs founding Tenochtitlán, the city at the center of their empire.²⁶ There also are hints here of the empire’s environmental foundations. The Aztecs initially adapted to the valley’s swampy marshes with a form of island farming. As they conquered the remainder of the valley, they irrigated drier areas.²⁷

In a similar vein, the art historian Jennifer Saracino begins our discussion with an analysis of a 1560 map of colonial Teotihuacan, Mexico, from the Newberry Library, and subsequent copies of it. In an era when European maps acted as imperialist tools, indigenous actors offered a distinctive challenge. Recognizing the power of the visual text, they adapted their own cultural cartographic elements within pictorial maps to assert land claims. A pictorial map like Mapa Sigüenza operates on multiple scales, depicting space artistically to tell a story rather than model reality. Indeed, indigenous mapmakers consciously chose to highlight their lineal connections to past elites to justify their land claims.

Fig. 0.1 Mapa Sigüenza (Nahuatl glyph map of Aztec migration from Aztlan to Tenochtitlán). MS, sixteenth century; 1830 ms. copy. Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

The historian Kelly Hopkins alternatively examines four maps from the 1600s and 1700s, offered by Europeans to support their colonial claims to lands surrounding the eastern Great Lakes. Yet, given their dependence on Native American knowledge of the region, the invaders produced representations revealing that the Haudenosaunee exploited an expansive geographic territory for hunting, fishing and trade, and worked to protect those ecosystems. And when the Haudenosaunee could no longer prevent European encroachment into Iroquois territory, they transformed their relations with the environment to participate in the Atlantic world market economy. Hopkins elevates her essay by analyzing the cartouches, or decorative frames, that offer allegorical summaries of the contents of imperial maps. These cartouches often highlighted abundant resources and the promise of greater profits with investment and settlement. As the environmental historian Mart Stewart observes, they offered a conditional statement about landscape and landscape change . . . meant to express dynamic environmental relationships rather than promote static ones.²⁸

Engaging a rich historiography that explores cultural appropriation as an intrinsic part of imperial mapping, the geographer Craig Colten examines the abundance and persistence of indigenous names for the waterways of Virginia, Florida, and Louisiana. Like Hopkins, Colten primarily uses planimetric maps, which represent horizontal positions of geographic features, to demonstrate that the different European powers initially claiming authority over these areas allowed for a comparative analysis. In the end, Colten concludes that their mapmakers did not simply appropriate names, and that their efforts at empire building depended intrinsically upon local knowledge of nature.

The historian Michelle Zacks employs maps from the US Coast Survey (now the Office of Coast Survey), formed in 1807—one of the US government’s first scientific organizations. The agency’s task was to facilitate commerce and national defense by producing nautical charts that identified the shoreline, water depths, and navigation hazards. In the process, as Zacks demonstrates, its mapmakers offered detailed studies of specific maritime spaces, some shaped by captive labor and others intimately understood by African Americans, both freed and enslaved, who navigated the Chesapeake in the oystering trade and in their path to emancipation.

THE REINVENTOR’S NATURE

As transatlantic cultures vied for dominion in the Americas, maps remained vital to the enterprise. They used geographic features to define political boundaries, regardless of the level of control on the ground, and identified resources for economic exploitation. With the scientific revolution in Europe, however, encounters with the distant and seemingly foreign environments of the Western Hemisphere allowed others to reimagine nature and its cartographic interpretations. Scientists and other explorers used maps to express spatial relations, but also to convey knowledge of the material world. Maps increasingly represented the human-nature relationship on multiple scales and through many modes of expression. For example, the Prussian geographer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt generated abstract and schematic maps during his trip to the Americas between 1799 and 1804. Through his cross-section image of Chimborazo, the dormant volcano and highest mountain in Ecuador, for example (fig. 0.2), he hoped that the spatial distribution (of biota) might reveal the complex interdependence in the natural world.²⁹

Fig. 0.2 Cross-section of the volcano Chimborazo, Ecuador, published by Alexander von Humboldt in the Geographie des plantes equinoxiales, in his volume Essai sur la geographie. Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

Ernesto Capello, a professor of history and Latin American studies, contemplates the reinvention of a specific landscape through the development of a scientific understanding of a mountain range. Traveling to South America as part of an expedition to measure the length of a degree of latitude at the equator, the eighteenth-century French explorers Charles Marie de La Condamine and Pierre Bouguer spent some ten years in what is now Ecuador. Among other achievements, they broke through certain European anxieties about the mountain with an innovative schematic map that deemphasized the altitude of an individual peak. Instead, they offered a less intimidating horizontal view that depicted the Andes as a range.

The work of La Condamine greatly influenced Humboldt, as is clear in the image of Chimborazo. In chapter 6, Adriana Méndez Rodenas, a professor of Caribbean and Latin American literature, offers a close, thoughtful reading of Humboldt’s writings during his journey on the Orinoco with Aimé Bonpland in 1800, to reveal how geographic and natural knowledge were constructed in Humboldt’s mind and expressed in cartographic imagery. Breaking free of Enlightenment traditions, she contends, Humboldt merged science and art, or observation and imagination, to see Nature as an interconnected whole. Humboldt’s maps and ideas of a holistic universe, in turn, had sweeping impacts on future generations.³⁰

While Humboldt, La Condamine, and Bouguer reimagined nature through observation and experimentation, other mapmakers reinvented nature by presenting aspirational images. The historian Brian Bockelman, for example, analyzes the presence of nonnative flora—the palm tree—in colonial maps, and later on the streets of Buenos Aires. These trees did not simply constitute a misrepresentation of nature. Rather, Bockelman contends, mapmakers consciously borrowed the long-established cartographic trope of the palm tree to convey South America’s exoticism and commercial possibilities. This trope proved so persuasive over time that Argentines were compelled to incorporate the palm tree into their physical landscape.

Raymond Craib, a historian of cartography, portrays another imagined environment. The route of Cortéz was not a concrete place at all. Rather, in the late nineteenth century, through writings, artwork, and cartographic representations, it became a place of the imagination, promulgated to tell a foundational saga in Mexico’s history and, in turn, to recreate a landscape in which it supposedly occurred. Historical authenticity, Craib suggests, was found less in the actual events of conquest than in cartographic and artistic metaphors that elided the violence of imperialism.

THE STATE’S NATURE

By the late nineteenth and twentieth century, state bureaucracies in nations across the Americas became more entrenched at the same time that more mathematical mapping methods emerged, creating the appearance of geography as an objective science. Bureaucratic structures enhanced state capacity by maintaining control and order, or, as the political scientist James C. Scott argues, by making a complex society or a complex natural world more legible. State-produced maps served these goals by seemingly offering images of rationality, efficiency, and knowledge.³¹ And through its widespread distribution of these maps, the state imbued the geographic profession with its authority.

Moreover, the nations that emerged across the Americas are settler colonial states. Such projects sought land and the construction of permanent, racially homogenous communities that aimed for the elimination of the native. Settler colonial societies across the Americas utilized similar political structures and cultural narratives to justify their actions. They argued that indigenous peoples failed to use the land adequately or appropriately. Colonial actors divided the land into private property, justifying their efforts as economic improvements and claiming sovereignty and legal authority.³² Bureaucratic mapmaking constituted an essential part of settler colonialism. Lorenzo Veracini reminds us that settler colonialism is an ongoing process. State-sponsored cartography, observes geographer Cole Harris, is one of the disciplinary strategies associated with the management of people, nature and space which have tended to simplify complex realities.³³ Such maps provided the government imprimatur for land seizures, cultural erasures, and persistent control within settler colonial regimes.

Perhaps nothing demonstrates these points as clearly as the Land Ordinance of 1785 and subsequent laws that authorized government surveyors to divide much of what became the continental United States into six-by-six-mile townships. The cadastral maps that emerged from surveys show the boundaries of these administrative units. Expressing the Cartesian logic of Western science, they rationalized nature and facilitated the sale of land by dividing those units, such as the townships of the Bounty Lands of the Illinois Territory (originally intended for veterans of the War of 1812), into smaller parcels of 160 acres each (fig. 0.3) The ideology embedded in the cadastral map supposedly insured the yeoman farmer’s participation in democratic government, but also justified white settlement of and Native American displacement from the continent by effectively obliterating indigenous patterns of land use. These maps, and subsequent ones from the US Biological Survey and the US Geological Survey, also suggested that nature consisted of nothing more than commodities to be identified, distributed, and developed, with no sense of the larger ecological whole.³⁴

In exploring efforts to map the riverine border between Mexico and the United States, environmental historian Mary Mendoza’s chapter offers a bridge between the preceding section on reimaging nature and the following essays on the state’s cartographic authority. She extrapolates a different type of nature, neither fully concrete nor fully imagined, but instead always shifting. Between the two nations, she argues, the political border was neither as visible nor as fixed as maps suggested. Nature in this story is dynamic, chaotic, and perhaps elusive. The Rio Grande moved, complicating territoriality and sovereignty and undermining efforts to define it cartographically.

Fig. 0.3 John Gardiner, Map of the Bounty Lands, Illinois (Washington: General Land Office, 1818). Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

Sara Gregg, another environmental historian, explains how the US Department of the Interior attempted to demonstrate its mastery of the arid and semiarid regions of the American West and induce their settlement by inventorying the region’s topographic and hydraulic features. This effort was part of a larger, ongoing, and aspirational state project to rationalize public land policy under the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909. As Gregg highlights, the department’s thematic maps simplified a complex space by depicting the spatial distribution of these geographic and natural phenomena in a quantitative graphic form. In the end, she concludes, control of the environment on the ground proved more illusory.

In the twentieth century, the role of the nation-state in the process of defining and mapping nature became more firmly entrenched, and in doing so, it increasingly reflected sovereign authority over science as well as political boundaries. For example, since their nation’s founding and led by their government, Canadians sought to better understand their country’s political, social, and ecological landscape—a task made more difficult by its sheer size. The geographers Matt Dyce and Graeme Wynn analyze the evolving scientific methods in mapping and data management employed in such ventures, from aerial photography to geographic information systems (GIS). These new technologies have advanced the production of information but, as Dyce and Wynn explain, the resultant maps have raised new questions about accuracy, omission, and truth.

The philosopher Peter Nekola suggests that echoes of the Humboldtian imagination can be found in government maps of US and Canadian forests in the late nineteen and twentieth century. While both national governments intended to aid the lumber interests through cartographic resource inventories, the maps they produced increasingly seemed to incorporate more holistic theories from the emerging sciences of forestry and ecology. Cartographers focused less on timber strands and more on interconnected forest systems; equally important, they recognized value in correlating patterns across different maps to protect their long-term sustainability.

EPILOGUE

The final essay in this book is A View from across the Pond, an epilogue by Catherine Dunlop, an American scholar of mapmaking and environmental history in Europe, where many of the cartographic traditions explored herein originated. Dunlop observes that the archive of the Americas is uniquely positioned for a synthesis of the history of cartography and environmental history, though the methods used herein are broadly applicable in a range of global geographic contexts. In addition to elucidating the themes that connect these chapters, Dunlop shows how maps of nature—and, by extension, this book—can be used in the classroom to teach core historical methods, as well as the complexity and contingencies of mapmaking and ideas of nature.

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In the end, our attention to maps as foundational texts stretches across academic boundaries, bringing together contributors from the history of cartography, environmental history, geography, philosophy, literature, art history, and other fields. These maps are both abstract and material. They are ephemeral and enduring. They offer seemingly fixed representations of particular spaces but, upon analysis, also reveal the dynamism of nature and society. Tools that have helped humans understand the spaces in which they live and interact, maps have instrumentalized the nature that humans encountered and shaped within those spaces. As the novelist Reif Larsen writes, A map does not just chart, it unlocks and formulates meaning; it forms bridges between here and there, between disparate ideas that we did not know were previously connected.³⁵ Maps enhance our comprehension of the always complicated, ever shifting connections between humans and nature, while negotiating the exercise of power over resources. Historically contingent documents, products of the many contextual factors that shaped their creation and use, these maps have revealed how people have perceived the Americas and engaged with their myriad environments, and, in the end, how they have found themselves changed by their nature as well.

PART ONE

PEOPLE’S NATURE

CHAPTER ONE

STAKING CLAIMS ON NATIVE LANDS

The Symbolic Power of Indigenous Cartographic Convention in the Ayer Map of Teotihuacan, Mexico (1560), and Its Copies

Jennifer Saracino

In the Newberry Library’s Ayer Collection, a map of Teotihuacan, an archaeological site about thirty miles northeast of present-day Mexico City, depicts the boundaries between the properties of three indigenous proprietors (plate 1). The map shows the men standing in different areas of the site, separated by bold black lines that differentiate property boundaries. Scholars have long been drawn to the map’s inclusion of the ruins of the pre-Hispanic city of Teotihuacan, abandoned about five hundred years before the Mexica people established the Aztec empire in the central Valley of Mexico.¹ The Mexica venerated the ruins of Teotihuacan as the origin site of their ancestors. They believed that life on earth occurred in five successive ages, each heralded by the creation of a separate sun. The fifth and present age, in which we currently live, began at Teotihuacan, where the gods Tecuciztecatl and Nanauatzin threw themselves into a great fire to become the sun and the moon.² The two great pyramids of Teotihuacan, the Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon, were both named for these deities, and the mapmakers included both pyramids in their depiction of the site.

The map is oriented with east at the top, and the ruins of Teotihuacan border its western edge toward the bottom, where two parallel lines mark the Avenue of the Dead, the three-mile-long axial road that extended the length of the city. At the map’s southern end, on the map viewer’s right, the road terminates in a large red circle emanating black wavy lines. This shape marks the Ciudadela, a sunken plaza that housed the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, where the city’s pre-Hispanic rulers may have once lived.³ At the far north of the avenue, on the map viewer’s left, a stepped hill form denotes the Pyramid of the Moon. A similar upside-down mound closer to the map’s center symbolizes the Pyramid of the Sun. Scattered across the map are brief explanations of the map’s features written in Nahuatl, a language that continued to be widely spoken by the native population after Spanish conquest.

At one point there were at least three known copies of this map. The American Museum of Natural History in New York holds the Saville copy, the Newberry Library in Chicago possesses the Ayer copy, and a third iteration, now lost, is referred to as the Mazapan map (fig. 1.1), which contained the most detail and might have been an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century copy of the missing original source.⁴ The visually distinctive maps combine European and indigenous cartographic conventions. The planimetrically rendered boundaries and river would have been legible to Spanish authorities; but certain elements, such as the footprints to symbolize roads or the indigenous pictographic symbols for place names, may have been less familiar. The added Nahuatl glosses (fig. 1.2) help clarify the map’s more nebulous features, including its date of production (written as 1560), though several scholars believe that they were likely added to the map much later.⁵ Why was the first version of this map made? Why was it then copied at least twice over the course of more than a hundred years? What do these maps collectively tell us about changing concepts of land throughout the colonial period and into the twentieth century, as well as the negotiation of these contested ideas among Teotihuacan’s diverse population?

This chapter demonstrates how the careful analysis of the Teotihuacan maps’ content and formal characteristics reveals how its indigenous creator(s) conceptualized their rightful claim to the land during a period when the very definitions of land, land tenure, and land rights were continually challenged and reconstituted by Spanish colonial authorities. As part of this analysis, this chapter provides an overview of indigenous mapping practices in central Mexico, and the potency of indigenous-made maps as tools for negotiation with Spanish authorities in land disputes. Throughout the colonial period, the Spanish Crown’s increasing encroachment upon native lands fostered the continued production and subsequent preservation of maps created by indigenous individuals to assert their rights; similar circumstances likely led to the Teotihuacan map’s initial creation and subsequent copying. A recognizable indigenous quality in these maps hints at their potency and efficacy as tools of negotiation with Spanish authorities. Their existence attests to the ways that indigenous mapmakers attempted to subvert or resist oppressive colonial policies by harnessing the symbolic authority of indigenous maps, made visible by pre-Hispanic and early colonial indigenous cartographic conventions.

Fig. 1.1 Reproduction of lost Mazapan map of unknown provenance, original c. eighteenth or nineteenth century. From José María Arreola, Códices y documentos en mexicano, in M. Gamio, ed., La población del Valle de Teotihuacán, vol. 1, part 2, plate 148 (Mexico City: Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1922). Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

These maps embody a particular paradox of colonization in which participatory mapping was used in service of the Spanish authorities but ensured the continuity of indigenous cartographic conventions and pre-Hispanic cosmological associations of Teotihuacan. As will be explained in this chapter, the mapmakers visualized their claims to the land not only through clearly demarcated boundary lines and markers, but also through the careful selection of visual symbols and iconography that denoted enduring and potent indigenous cultural associations with the landscape. Thus, the indigenous mapmakers’ rights to the land were not just proprietary in nature, but inherent due to their cultural and cosmological associations with the landscape, attained through long-standing occupation of the site dating back to their ancestors. The mapmakers made these associations visible on the map in a number of ways,