This chapter charts the cartographic and “literary mapping”—at once imaginative and real—of Trinidad over the long nineteenth century, from just prior to the date of its capture by the British in 1797 to the first decade of the twentieth century. The discussion stitches together different mappings and literary representations of the island, its topography, its landscape and its people. In particular, it investigates the mapping of the island and the projections of mimetic power encoded in such work as well as later challenges to the apparent authority of such cartographic endeavour. It follows in the vein of work by Tobias Döring, who has stated that both mapping and the narratives that cartography engenders shape the “imperial archive” in the Caribbean. “Whether or not this project is successful”, Döring writes, “colonial maps try to construct a comprehensive pattern in which the universal variety of the world … can be subsumed under a common symbolism and so become part of a single unifying text: an atlas of the world”. Yet, as Döring has noted, such universalist aims come with their own problems—which could be characterized as the issues of difference, Otherness and unfamiliarity regularly found in colonial discourse—all of which can serve to undermine the supposed power of the map. Cartographic and literary texts may signify a certain kind of legitimizing power, but each can be subverted and transgressed in different ways. This alternate side of the map's signification is gestured to in the latter part of the chapter—as the authority of the first map of Trinidad commissioned after its British capture was later cast in some considerable doubt by the writer E. L. Joseph.

This chapter contains four sections, the first of which deals with the cartographic and literary representations of Trinidad in its first phase of British rule. It argues that Britain's mapping of the land masked a latent colonial “Cartesian anxiety” concerning the unknown qualities of the territory. The second section investigates how the initial period of Trinidad's British rule, under its first British governor, Thomas Picton, exposes a narrative, however inadvertent, of disobedience to colonial authority. The court room, as Edward Said demonstrated, can produce “imaginative geography” and it is in this arena that Picton's drama unfolded.