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X Marks the Spot:

How “False” Cartography Helped Shape a Nation, 1600-1700

Emily Whitworth

History 3031

Dr. Wagner

December 14, 2016

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Over 400 years ago in the Atlantic Ocean, three ships, complete with 105 men and 39

crew members aboard, steadily paced themselves across an uncharted and unfamiliar territory.

One of the three ships contained Captain John Smith - an English explorer, soldier, and self-

proclaimed author. Evident to Smith at the time, he would begin to journal and create the first

ever “accurate" map of both Virginia and New England. Smith’s accuracy of coastlines and

physical landmarks has long been hailed as nothing short of astounding when put in context with

the technology (or lack thereof) in his possession. His original maps were sent back to England

with the hopes of capturing the minds - and pocketbooks - of wealthy potential investors. Fast

forward 150 years from Smith’s maiden voyage and over thirteen colonies and two and a half

million people inhabited the once mysterious coastline. For the first time ever, a massive influx

of foreign colonists to the New World was set into motion, some say solely by Smith’s intricate

and persuasive map-making skills. His illustrations painted a beautiful land, one in which

Powhatan’s Indian tribe and Smith’s crew worked side-by-side, one with hundreds of small

villages located so closely together that trade between the two cultures would lead to prosperity

of an unfathomable magnitude, and most importantly, a land so magnificent, it convinced

English settlers that their true destiny lay an ocean away. 

Due to the historical impact of Smith’s voyage itself, the maps in that Smith created

during his time in New England and Virginia are often times glossed over as mere

accompaniments to the ushering in of a new world. The map seems innocent at first glance, but a

deeper meaning lay beneath the black lines and indiscriminately drawn X’s. Global travel was

not a new phenomenon, yet it was seen at unprecedented numbers during the seventeenth and

eighteenth century. This sudden uptick in immigration from place to place begs several

questions. What factors were driving people from the only homelands they had ever known?

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What did they visualize when they thought of the New World? How did that image construct

itself? John Smith’s maps acted as a beacon in the dark for a vast majority of settlers. Although

they did not know what they were following, they dredged forward with an unhedged faith. More

importantly, the maps are a microcosm into the immense roles cartographic works play into

social propaganda, with innate bias and anything but scientific representation.

Up until the 1970s, A vast majority of cartographic essays and scholarly works examined

maps from an immensely superficial point of view. The overall consensus that maps were more

useful in mathematical and scientific studies than political or territorial ones had been long-

standing - since maps became a scholarly focus. As the twenty-first century progressed (and the

scholarly work on cartography followed in suit), a major shift in academic thought began to take

root. In previous decades, historians became inadvertently guilty of discussing maps from a strict

empirical and dynastical mindset.1 The first prominent and controversial figure in modern

cartographic thought to counter those long-standing these beliefs emerged in the late 1980s,

stating that maps were more “tools of the modern state,” rather than scientific constructs.2 This

school of thought quickly took off and historians and cartographers alike began analyzing the

map as a driving factor in cultural history. To these historians, the simplest of maps create a

window into time period long ago. Analysis of each map’s contextual circumstances change their

interpretations entirely. The revolutionary methods of reading “white space” on map surfaces

and viewing them from different cultural lenses has led to maps of Colonial New England acting

as instruments of change – territorially and politically.3

1 For examples of early cartographic academia, see Lloyd A. Brown, The Story of Maps. (New York: New York Press, 1949); Norman J. Thrower, Maps and Man: Examination of Cartography in Relation to Culture and Civilization (Chicago: Chicago Press, 1972).2 J.B. Harley, "Silences and Secrecy: The Hidden Agenda of Cartography in Early Modern Europe," Imago Mundi 40 (1988): 57-76.3 J.B. Harley, “The Map User in the Revolution” in Mapping the American Revolutionary War (Chicago, 1978): 83-87.

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The science of cartography has taken on new meaning in terms of being a scientific

discipline in modern day academia. When analyzing maps, current and past, there is no longer

one imperial lens through which to view them. Each map has a contextual history, hidden

agenda, and was most likely created with the hopes of persuasion in the creator’s mind. Not just

confined to seventeenth century New England, the “victims of a map” are often pushed aside in

historical studies.4 John Smith’s map painted a false portrait of circumstances in New England

and Virginia, and this farce became a driving factor in the colonization of the Western world, and

the simultaneous removal of indigenous peoples.

Using examples of prominent maps from Colonial New England, this essay will argue

Harley’s perspective, that map making as a whole possesses an innate bias and must be studied

with a great deal of scholarly caution, using Smith’s map as a lens into this controversial issue.

“Like the modern tragedy of the dispossessed Palestinian people,” wrote J.B. Harley, “the much

older tragedy in American history saw the map as an instrument in which power was exercised to

destroy an indigenous society.”5 While this thought process is a new and unfamiliar one, the

relevance and importance of this argument deserves far more scholarly attention. Captain John

Smith and the Virginia Company of New England mastered the art of making maps for use as

propaganda, a practice that had been in use for centuries and is still shockingly prominent today.

The overall context of Smith’s maps, the paradox of the Indian assistance in creating the maps,

and a new-found practice of reading white space, all work together to comprise an argument

against the scientific legitimacy of cartography.

John Smith’s Maps - Heroic or Heinous?

4 Samih al-Qasim, Mahmud Darwish, and Adonis, Victims of a Map, trans. Abdullah al-Udhari (London: Al Saqi Books, 1984). 5 J.B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps (Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 170.

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Arguably the most detailed and influential map of the Colonial time period is John

Smith’s maps of Virginia. The map contains extensive illustrations of geographical landmarks,

small villages, and an excellent representation of the eastern coastline of North America. The

actual composition of the map itself is exquisite, with extravagant calligraphy sprawled across

the top. From a superficial viewpoint, the map is incredibly accurate in consideration of the time

period in which it was created. With that said, this image must be analyzed with J.B. Harley’s

method of “placing the map into production context.”6 Why was he spending so much time

drawing the landscape? What were his intentions for this map back in Great Britain? Upon

further examination, multiple components of the map are laden with propaganda and

imperialistic hopes of his sponsoring charter.7 The interactions between Smith, his men, and the

Indians are unignorably woven throughout these maps. An ornate drawing of Powhatan himself

sits in the upper left hand corner. This drawing portrays Powhatan as king of his tribe, with

various other Indians below him, bowing down. The word “Powhatans” is even woven

throughout the trees and villages across a large swath of land in Virginia.8 Smith and Powhatan

had a well-documented relationship, and the constant mention of the Algonquian Indians in the

maps led the people back in Great Britain to believe that the interactions between the two

societies were merely friendly encounters.9 Investors were ready to pull out their pocketbooks

once they visualized the New World as a place bustling with friendly Indian villages. We know

now that they were anything but friendly, and quarrels between the colonists and Indians (and

even between separate native tribes) occurred frequently.

6 J.B. Harley, “The Evaluation of Early Maps: Towards a Methodology,” Imago Mundi 22 (1968): 657 Gabriel Brahm and Mark Driscoll, Prosthetic Territories: Politics and Hypertechnologies (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995).8 John Smith, “Map of New England,” 1616.9 Smith talks of these encounters in Phillip L. Barbour, The Jamestown Voyages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 82-83.

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The map itself appears to cover Virginia in its entirety, but it actually only depicts the

land under Powhatan’s control. The Monacans, Mannahoacks, Mangoags, Chawons,

Tochwoghs, and various other Indian tribes are penciled in surrounding the land in which Smith

explored and documented. All of Smith’s voyages into unknown territory were led by

Algonquians and it is likely that they could not venture any further into Virginia due to tribal

wars. Small crosses on the map represent areas that were drawn based off of Indian stories, not

Smith’s actual experiences. The foreign tribal lands are meticulously dotted with these symbolic

crosses, representing places that Smith had only heard about from Algonquian Indian tales and

battle stories. The crosses are small and inconspicuous, and they do not indicate any conflicts

between warring tribes in the region that would one day pose an enormous problem to future

colonists.

Another fascinating aspect of this map that separates it from others of the same kind is

the directional positioning of the drawing itself. During this time, a vast majority of maps were

created with due North at the top of the paper. This compass has North pointing towards the

right, instead. Smith was attempting to take his audience (the investors) on a journey with the

map. When looking at it, it is easy to visualize the ship coming up to shore and looking at this

foreign land, full of possibilities, with your back to the direction you came from. There are small

circles representing small cities or living areas of “ordinary people,” while the larger buildings

represent living quarters of the “royalties.” The map makes Virginia seem like a heavily

populated area, with towns back-to-back along the rivers and tributaries. While it is hard to say,

it is unlikely that Virginia was truly this populated at the time; Smith was attempting to once-

again persuade the potential investors and future Virginian colonists.

The Paradox of Native Map Makers

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Nearly all maps that were created during the Colonial period of expansion are accredited

to the heads of their respective commissioned charters. John Smith, obviously, is known for his

famous maps of Virginia and New England. Juan de la Cosa published several maps of the New

World, all signed and dated with his signature. While the reader only sees the name of the

European explorer, the names that shaped these cartographic works are the ones that are missing.

If every author of each map were listed out, hundreds of pages would be filled with Indians

names from every tribe inhabiting the region. Native Americans undoubtedly played a significant

role in the “colonization by map” of their lands.10

A common thought presented by historians today asks what would North America might

have looked like had the Europeans not discovered the continent. The reciprocal of that question

is not as frequently mentioned, but demands attention in terms of cartography. What kind of role

did the Indians play in the creation of these pieces of propaganda? In Harley’s The New Nature

of Maps, he supports a relatively new ideology that “without Indian contributions…a map of

continental scale would have unrolled far more slowly in front of European eyes.”11 This belief

becomes inarguable when one realizes that Smith’s journey into North American territory would

have been far shorter and much more difficult had Powhatan’s tribe not acted as his exploratory

guides. These guides kept Smith and his men protected from rival tribes, led the men wherever

they asked, and showed them prominent geographical landmarks. Paradoxically, the colonists

returned the favor by renaming the lands in Old English tongues and stripping the natives of their

once held lands in a systematic process.

The mapping technique that the Indians used was fundamentally different than that of the

European explorers. Not only were the processes in which the maps created different, but the

10 Jeffrey Stone, “Imperialism, Colonialism and Cartography,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 13 (1988): 57–6411 Harley, The New Nature of Maps,170.

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very goals of the maps themselves. Native Americans viewed maps as political portrayals, with

very little recognition of space and distance.12 Many of their maps were drawn in circles, with

their own tribe sitting in the middle, and corresponding circle layers for other tribes or regions of

concern. Landmarks with significant spiritual relevance to the Indians were given names based

off of their appearances. Maps did not show geographical distance between places but political

and social ones.13 Native Americans were not known for traditional imperialistic behavior.

Individual tribes claimed their swath of land and tended to stay on it. There were skirmishes

between different tribes, but a hunger for more land and power was not a staple of indigenous

culture like it was for Europeans. This distinct engrained social discrepancy is why early Indian

maps did not contain geographical details, but sociopolitical ones. The European travelers

mapped in terms of metes and bounds. They used these maps to sail back and forth between

lands they were spectating for colonization and they were tools that relied hugely on geospatial

sciences. When Smith and his men allowed Algonquian Indians to assist in the creation of the

maps, these two styles blended in a discrete but noticeable manner. Indian place names encircle

larger towns with heavy British influence, such as Jamestown, Cape Henry, and Cape Charles.

Forests, and some ponds, were drawn far larger than their realistic size, most likely because

Indians had little concept of mathematical size.14 These discrepancies between the two cultures

cartographic methodology put the Native Americans at a severe disadvantage when imperialists

began colonizing North America. They helped the men find their new homes, only to lose their

own.

Reading “White Space”

12 Harley, The New Nature of Maps, 17813 Gregory Waselkov, Peter Wood, and Tom Hatley, Powhatan's Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006). 14 Malcolm Lewis, “Indian Maps: Their Place in the History of Plains Cartography,” Great Plains Quarterly 2 (1984): 91–108.

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The most difficult and analytical way in which these maps can be used a microcosm into

the issues within scientific cartography in the process of what J.B. Harley calls “reading white

spaces.”15 This term designates a methodical procedure of attempting to discover what was on

the land that the colonists mapped before their arrival. Like mentioned in the previous section,

the removal of Indian landmark names was a powerful way in which John Smith and his men

laid claim to their new-found lands. This practice of territorial claim has been used in historical

conquests for years, most recently in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.16 While the earlier of

Smith’s maps still contained various Algonquian place names, the maps were sent back to Great

Britain and appropriated to have that Great-Britain, imperial “flair.” The traditionally native

nomenclature of the original map was immensely altered by Prince Charles at Smith’s discretion.

In his now published journal, “A Description of New England,” Smith asked Charles to change

the “Barbarous” names for “such English.”17 There is also a chart in the journal presenting the

thirty alterations to the reader, with the port of Cape Cod now being labeled as Cape James and

the town of Sagoquas transitioning to Oxford. For map readers who have never seen Smith’s

journals, one would not know of the significant eradication of Algonquian names in Colonial

New England. It us uncommon for people to see a map and ask what was there before the land

was claimed and titled, and this inevitable human err creates a vast void in cartographic

academia. Colonial maps completely disregard that there was a life and culture attached to the

land before their discovery, and made it easier for colonists to uproot the indigenous peoples of

Virginia and expand further and further west.

While the majority of Smith’s Map of Virginia show a populated landmass, there is also a

far less detailed area that had just as large an impact on the British charters that colonized the 15 Harley, The New Nature of Maps, 18716 Mark Vessey, Sharon Betcher, Robert Daum, and Harry Maier, The Calling of the Nations: Exegesis, Ethnography, and Empire in a Biblical-Historic Present (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011).17 John Smith, "A Description of New England” (1616): 3

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continent. For decades, investors have looked to maps to discover vacant lands on which their

money would be put to good use. Heavily populated regions make for successful trade, but

sparsely inhabited ones leave opportunity for growth and expansion. The entire right portion of

Smith’s map is left empty. This “white space” made the New World seem like an open frontier.

Investors would have been delighted to invest in a place with endless possibilities of

development and economic exploitation.

Most modern maps are created with cartographic technology, but there is still an

immense margin of error. Personal bias and underlying goals of map makers has long influenced

their creations and continue to do so today. In the case of early Colonial explorers’ cartographic

works, most notably John Smith’s, the heavily influenced sketches show only a fraction of

insight into the difficulties all cartographers consistently face. Smith knew he had one ultimate

goal: to attract investors and colonists to the Eastern coast of North America. Knowing his maps

would reach the eyes of thousands, he altered them in any way possible to make the land seem as

enticing as possible. Virginia’s formation was not a result of the maps, but they were without a

doubt a reaction to the catalyst that the maps acted as.

Primary Sources

Smith John. A Description of New England. 1616.

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Smith, John. Captain John Smith's Map of Virginia: Reproduced from an Engraving in the

Library of Congress. Map. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1957.

Smith, John. "Map of New England." Map.

Secondary Sources

Thrower, Norman Joseph William. Maps and Man: An Examination of Cartography in Relation

to Culture and Civilization. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972.

Barbour, Phillip L. The Jamestown Voyages under the First Charter 1606-1609. Cambridge:

Univ. Press, 1969.

Brahm, Gabriel, and Mark Driscoll. Prosthetic Territories: Politics and Hypertechnologies.

Boulder: Westview Press, 1995.

Brown, Lloyd A. The Story of Maps. Boston: Little, Brown, 1949.

Harley, J. B. "The Evaluation of Early Maps: Towards A Methodology." Imago Mundi22, no. 1

(1968).

Harley, J. B. Mapping the American Revolutionary War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1978.

Harley, J. B. "Silences and Secrecy: The Hidden Agenda of Cartography in Early Modern

Europe." Imago Mundi40, no. 1 (1988): 57-76.

Harley, J. B. The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography. Baltimore, MD:

Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

Hatley, Tom, Gregory Waselkov, and Peter Wood. , Powhatan's Mantle: Indians in the Colonial

Southeast. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006.

Lewis, Malcom. "Indian Maps: Their Place in the History of Plains Cartography." Great Plains

Quarterly 2 (1984).

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Stone, Jeffrey. "Imperialism, Colonialism and Cartography." Transactions of the Institute of

British Geographers 13 (1988).

Vessey, Mark, Sharon Betcher, Robert Daum, and Harry Maier. The Calling of Nations:

Exegegis, Ethnography, and Empire in a Biblical-Historic Present. Toronto: University

of Toronto Press, 2011.