joyce lorimer: Jeannette D. Black Memorial fellow 1989-1990 ; Helen Watson Buckner Memorial, 2005-2006
guiana during the late elizabethan and early stuart period
I am currently writing a general history of English and Irish interest in Guiana during the late Elizabethan and early Stuart period. Although several English-drawn manuscript charts related to these activities have survived, one must look, almost exclusively, to the publishing houses of Netherlanders for printed maps of Guiana issued between the turn and the middle of the seventeenth century. It was Theodor de Bry who mapped the information gathered by expeditions of Sir Walter Ralegh and Lawrence Keymis in his GUIANA. Tabula Geographica nova omnium oculis exibens et proponens verisimam descriptionem potentissimi et aurifenRegni GUIANA Sub linea equinoctiali inter Brasiliam et peru siti per nautem aliquem qui GUALTHERO RALEGHsemper adsuit delineata, published in his Americae, pars VIII, Frankfurt am Main, 1599. Johannes de Laet included a map of Gvaiana ofte de provincien tusschen Rio de las Amazonas ende Rio de Yviapari ofte Orinoqve, in the Dutch (1625, 1630) Latin (1633) and French (1640) editions of his Nieuwe Wereldt ofte Beschrijvinghe van West-Indien. Substantially the same map, GUIANA sive AMAZONUM REGIO, appears in the NIEVWE ATLAS published by Willem Janszoon and Joan Blaeu in 1635 and subsequent Blaeu atlases of 1640 and 1667.
Unusually for European cartography of the Americas, the absence of English printed maps reflects neither an English attempt to keep information about their activities on the coast secret, nor aggressive Dutch attempts to establish an overriding claim to the region through cartography. Behind the scenes, the information on Dutch printed maps reflects, firstly, the free flow of information between Dutch and English map publishers and draftsmen. Theodor de Bry had interactions with Richard Hakluyt and Sir Walter Ralegh. De Laet appears to have acquired information from English surveys of the Amazon estuary through the English chartmaker Gabriel Tatton, who worked for Dutch publishers at points in his career. De Laet also corresponded with Sir Henry Spelman, treasurer of the English Guiana Company.
On the page, these maps make no symbolic claims to territory beyond marking the location of indigenous villages and Dutch, English, French and Irish outposts. Some of the named settlements in the north channel of the Amazon are confirmed by other written sources to have been occupied by Dutch, English, French and Irish, and had cartographical life long after they had been destroyed by the Portuguese. Secondly, for me, the printed maps reinforce the reality of international enterprise on the Guiana coast, which prospered on the basis of cooperative, commercial relationships between indigenous peoples and Dutch, English, French and Irish traders, when ambitious, exclusive English plans for conquest or plantation colonies failed. The Amazon was a transnational commercial entrepot. The same kind of pattern can be seen further up the Guiana coast both before and after the Portuguese assaults drove Northern Europeans out of the Amazon in the early 1630s. Individual or small groups of English and Irishmen settled separately, or mixed in with Zeelanders and French in the Cayenne, Wanari, Saramacca, Surinam and Essquibo in the 1630s and 1640s. The printed maps are thus a testimony to the primacy of the Dutch publishing houses, but, at the same time, evidence of the openness of Guiana or, as the Dutch called it, the Wild Coast to northern European exploration, trade, and settlement up to the middle of the seventeenth century.
References Cited:
Lorimer, J., English and Irish Settlement on the River Amazon, 1550-1646, Hakluyt Society, 2nd ser., 171, 1989.
Sir Walter Ralegh's Discoverie of Guiana, Hakluyt Society, 3rd ser., 15, 2006.
Tyacke, S., ‘English Charting of the River Amazon c. 1595-c. 1630’, Imago Mundi, 32 (1980), pp. 73-89.
Zandvleit, K., Mapping for Money, Amsterdam, 1998.