Overview

Chronicling the British pursuit of the legendary El Dorado, this text tells the story of geography, cartography, and scientific exploration in Britain's South American colony, Guyana. How did 19th-century Europeans turn areas they called terra incognita into bounded colonial territories? How did a tender-footed gentleman, predisposed to seasickness (and unable to swim), make his way up churning rivers into thick jungle, arid savanna, and forbidding mountain ranges, survive for the better part of a decade, and emerge with a map? What did that map mean? In answering these questions, D. Graham Burnett brings to light the work of several such explorers, particularly Sir Robert H. Schomburgk, the man who claimed to be the first to reach the site of Ralegh's El Dorado. Commissioned by the Royal Geographical Society and later by the British Crown, Schomburgk explored and mapped regions in modern Brazil, Venezuela, and Guyana, always in close contact with Amerindian communities. Drawing heavily on the maps, reports, and letters that Schomburgk sent back to England, and especially on the luxuriant images of survey landmarks in his ""Twelve Views in the Interior of Guiana"", Burnett shows how a vast network of traverse surveys, illustrations, and travel narratives not only laid out the official boundaries of British Guiana but also marked out a symbolic landscape that fired the British imperial imagination.

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9780226081212

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In this scholarly work, the minutiae of map and territory disputes defining British Guiana are exhaustively examined via the extant literature of the principal explorers. These date from questionable maps created under the auspices of Sir Walter Raleigh to Schomburgk and Humboldts' perambulations in the 9th century. Discovery of an El Dorado was the lure drawing the Dutch, French, Spanish, English and North Americans to dispute and fight for territorial claims over the intervening centuries, but the reality of colonization was a mudbank stretching interminably into dense tropical swamplands, dangerous jungle and a habitat to native tribes unpredictable in their alliances. Burnett also explains the many myths, the proving of which or otherwise, preoccupied all explorers. He gives a detailed analysis of those pertaining to the anticipated inland sea, the Mahanarva Empire and El Dorado. The contemporary problem of equating an unknown terra incognita recognized as a historical source with the living actuality of the terrain is discussed. Inaccuracy of early maps exacerbated the difficulties whilst a parallel concern was to find land suitable for cash crop cultivation for Britain who ultimately succeeded in adding the colony to a burgeoning Empire. Botanical specimens assisted in defraying the cost of expeditions. The explorers drew on whatever resources were available to them in an attempt to produce a definitive, accurate map of Guiana. This included co-opting the navy to navigate the many rivers flowing through the Orinoco Delta and calibrating this data to their own observations. The survival skills involved plus polymorphous scientific techniques are redolent of renaissance man traversing the wilderness, astonishing in the modern era of specialization. The illustrations included, particularly the maps dating from the period, are apt and vividly evocative both in place and artistic style and are deservedly collector's items. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

D. Graham Burnett is an assistant professor in the Honors College at the University of Oklahoma.

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