I

One iconic and infamous early modern Caribbean map depicts 285 neatly named and parcelled plantations, most with coastal cultivation facing warm waters, and interiors interspersed with churches and fortifications. This 1657 portrayal of Barbados by Richard Ligon is replete with more subtle meanings. Spaces on the ocean-battered Atlantic coast and the less-developed interior, however, are portrayed in pictorial abstractions. Roads leading inland fade into sketches of rougher terrain that contains runaway slaves fleeing a mounted and armed white pursuer and an Indigenous figure with a bow and crown, among other visual synopses of colonial life as described by British colonists. This last figure is one Salymingoe, who is illustrated on land with text identifying ‘his Canoue 35 foot longe’, presumably in the area where he once lived. Elsewhere, white and black handlers work with camels, a failed novelty of local plantations, while wild pigs roam unnamed hills and sea monsters frolic in the untamed sea.Footnote ¹ Subsequent reprints of this map erased much of this rich extra-geographical information: Salymingoe and his canoe disappeared; gone also are African representations, though the spatial claim of 10,000 acres for ‘the merchants of London’ remained.Footnote ² Visualizations of mystery pivoted to projections of mastery.

Early modern mapmaking grew in sophistication alongside the European age of exploration. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europeans accumulated more knowledge about the new places they knew best: coasts. Other immediate features – shores, inlets, and towns – were less essentialized than inhospitable interiors with at times unknown features, sometimes intentionally left ‘empty’, as if these lands were unoccupied and open to European claims.Footnote ³ Map features were malleable projections of social constructs. Especially earlier on, lived experience influenced spatial information at least as much as surveying, and thus ignited imaginations that guided future endeavours. This became cyclical: abstractions about material life influenced imperial perceptions and actions upon a space, often to deleterious effects for its flora and fauna, and for the racialized Indigenous and African bodies that were abused to change these landscapes.Footnote ⁴ The scientific revolution and the Enlightenment gradually shifted maps from the Renaissance rediscoveries of Ptolemaic principles towards cartographic approaches that were more suited to categorization and systematization which characterized the imperial mindsets.Footnote ⁵ As eighteenth-century European officials became more interested in geographic accuracy, extra-geographical information thick-mapped onto the Americas faded in representation. And as topography and geography advanced in measurable and verifiable rigour, maps became more of a scientific tool, sterilized of stylized sentiment.Footnote ⁶

This transformative era in both colonization and cartography – the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – provides a fascinating glimpse into the process of creating the Atlantic, a space of change and continuity west of the Atlas mountains, bounded by physical perimeters of what Europeans saw as old and new worlds. Claiming and coveting the Americas often shaped the informative spectacle of these maps. Though their explicit intentions ranged drastically, maps regularly served to summarize, hypothesize, and modify people and places, ultimately facilitating projects of ethnocide engineered by competing empires.Footnote ⁷ Maps naturalized colonialist subjugation in space. The Caribbean was the region of earliest European claims, colonialist consumption, and interaction among Indigenous and African peoples whose own ‘mental maps’ imagined spaces of survival or paths to autonomy that defied European classificatory prerogatives.Footnote ⁸ Developments in mapping practices were essential to creating the Caribbean as an idea – an exoticized space for desirable commodities and differences of race. It was at the forefront of information-making for paralleled imperial and evangelical imperatives that defined the Americas.Footnote ⁹

For example, the first European map of the Caribbean (Figure 1) came from Juan de la Cosa, the cartographer for Christopher Columbus. His world map includes rich images that relate Iberia and its connection to historical events and all other parts of the world. Used at the time for its geographical information, this map also conveys the Iberian worldview and priorities, in particular with regard to peoples outside Europe. The map presents images of the African rulers with whom Spain and Portugal traded for gold, and the image of the gold mine in El Mina (present-day Ghana), which includes a painting of three enslaved African workers carrying loads on their heads. Spain guarded this map and many that followed as state secrets.

Source: Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1500_map_by_Juan_de_la_Cosa.jpg.

Fig. 1. Juan de la Cosa, Mappa Mundi (1500)

As other European states vied for colonial profits in the Americas, each produced similar heavily guarded cartographic schools.Footnote ¹⁰ Each early modern tradition continued conventions of extra-geographical information via embellished images of various peoples, plants, and places.Footnote ¹¹ Columbus, a Genoese captain known as Cristoforo Colombo in Italian, was one of several early explorers born on that peninsula and not Iberia. They included the Florentine cartographer Amerigo Vespucci, who sailed for Spain and Portugal, and later disproved Columbus's assertions of landing in Asia, and after whom the German Martin Waldseemüller named the new hemisphere in the feminized, Latinized form – America. Others were Giovanni Verrazzano and Giovanni Caboto, who famously worked for the French and English, respectively.Footnote ¹² Their occupational abilities produced knowledge first for Spanish consumption, and later, as this article will show, for wider audiences of rivals or academics.Footnote ¹³

Constructing maps with extra-geographical historic information has recently regained popularity among digital humanists. This practice, called ‘thick-mapping’ (inspired by Clifford Geertz’s ‘thick description’ of culture), adds interactive media layers to augment representations of space as understood by the various groups of people who relate or have related to it.Footnote ¹⁴ It investigates and pushes the limits of conveying detailed meaning via maps, and, in doing so, draws attention to the ways in which all maps – both with and without thick description – can reflect and/or shape worldviews. Creating these types of maps allows spatial historians to revisit core analytical categories such as race, gender, class, and state power in relation to, and as sources to study, physical environs and dynamics of the past.Footnote ¹⁵ A rich and illustrative example of this type of work in the early modern Atlantic world is Vincent Brown's visualization and exploration of Jamaica's slave revolts.Footnote ¹⁶

While these scholarly approaches are relatively new, early modern mapmakers also expressed layered information to conceptualize a particular spatial world and shape others’ worldviews. In essence, the mapmakers created sources which reflected a ‘new world’ as envisioned by those introduced to it for the first time, while also protecting the desires of these would-be conquerors onto the space. Rather than reflecting the space as it was understood by those who already lived there, mapmakers attempted to layer European understandings of self, space, belonging, ownership, race, and desire onto it. This makes these older maps ideal sources for historians of the early modern Caribbean to deconstruct.Footnote ¹⁷

Analysis of colonialist commission and omission in early modern maps may be critically read against their grains of intent of ‘plantocratic fantasy of space’ or ‘legal fictions’ and for profundity in their silences.Footnote ¹⁸ This consideration prompts several serious questions. How did maps of the Caribbean normalize colonialist outlooks for audiences? What can the maps tell us of European desires? Consequently, what do they say about European design? By investigating these main questions of European intent, another more critical spatial issue comes to the fore: how can the interrogation of European spatial semiotics in visualizations uncover evidence of autonomous Indigenous or African spaces?

II

The background and methods of this project to interrogate European maps as Caribbean sources require explanation. Drawn towards the history of cartography to answer these research questions derived from our proximate scholarly backgrounds, we the authors worked together as fellows at the John Carter Brown Library (JCB) at Brown University, immersed in their rich primary and secondary collections. Our selected scope of two centuries allowed us to trace developments in the interplay of race, desire, and space across European representations of the Caribbean colonial spaces such as plantations, mountains, and waters during an era of extreme competition and conflict. In these years, some 500,000 Africans were imported to the region and at least as many Indigenous inhabitants perished.Footnote ¹⁹ Depictions of the plantations they built, and the shrinking autonomous spaces beyond them, emphasizes how these maps reflected, reproduced, and rationalized myriad instances of imperial violence. Mindful of the performative, fictive, and speculative scopes of geographic representation that allow maps rhetoric or persuasion beyond utility, we began this project as a thought experiment with some basic hypotheses.Footnote ²⁰ We anticipated that, as African and Indigenous demographics shifted in correspondence with expanding plantation landscapes, portrayals of their space would also shift, revealing tacit meanings behind cartographic intentions. We also expected that extra-geographical motifs would change with Enlightenment influences that made the field more scientifically precise.

The omissions and silences of non-European spatial meaning in these maps also speak loudly, and offer openings to interrogate deliberate absences. At the same time, the icons, decorations, toponyms, flora, fauna, and many other demarcations of space offer more obvious intentionality and significance to Europeans.Footnote ²¹ Both the implicit and explicit, tacit and overt references to autonomous space provide opportunities to push the maps beyond their original use towards more representative readings of how Indigenous and African peoples navigated colonial space without cartographic privileges. We therefore analyse European maps as sources for the marginalized early modern Caribbean.

Cartographers marked maps with meaning from the European imperial and cultural contexts that enveloped them, which influenced representation of abundance or dearth for commodity possibilities, navigation routes for wealth extraction, and limitations of territory to avoid (or incite) military conflict over these resources. In this era, maps were often status symbols of acquisitive or academic abilities or gifts to influence policy or investment choices.Footnote ²² These inherently synthesized and generalized renderings of space blended utility and desire, and circulated an advertisement bolstered by ostensibly accurate information. Historians are in general agreement: Dutch maps during the golden age were intrinsically agents of empire.Footnote ²³

This article deliberately diverges from specificities of cartographic technique to view them in the aggregate and against their intended visualizations and voids. For example, the vast majority of early Dutch Caribbean maps were created by mapmakers hired by the Westindische Compagnie. Company directors proudly displayed them to show both achievements and aspirations to investors.Footnote ²⁴ Arent Roggeveen's 1676 map of Curaçao depicts an island that had been central to the Dutch slave trade for more than five years and its main port, Willemstad, which had just opened to free trade, a mercantile experiment that made the company a considerable profit. Consequently, the interior of the island appears largely blank on the map, with only port towns and salt pans, the two largest sources of income, marked. Two detailed insets testify to the company's industriousness. In one, cherubs with cutting-edge scientific equipment survey a fortress protecting several Dutch flagships with its canons. The other inset enlarges Fort Amsterdam's schematics in St Anne's Bay. It emphasizes trade and industry, showing warehouses, an ingenio (sugar mill)-type building, and a depiction of what appear to be enslaved Africans manually manoeuvring a merchant's ship into port with ropes.Footnote ²⁵ The imagery focuses on European conceptions of profitability over functionality or ways in which the space must have been conceived of by the enslaved. These maps diminished markers of risk, such as rebellious slaves who increasingly co-ordinated resistance with nearby Coro in Venezuela via watercraft unlike those that appear.Footnote ²⁶

While many colonial maps shared this purpose, others highlight features for certain audiences. For example, estate maps like John Hapcott's 1646 schema of Fort Plantation in Barbados shows private property lines to support legal claims and boundary disputes in English tradition.Footnote ²⁷ Decorative maps helped garner investment capital, or compel royal efforts at consolidating the realm, as in the 1696 map showing ‘principal islands in America belonging to the English empire’.Footnote ²⁸ Some maps charted navigation channels and currents, while others that were heavy on iconography of natural resources or planting focused on extraction plans for the Caribbean.Footnote ²⁹ Still others were created to inform the public and shape their emerging views of this region. Each type offers new chances to interrogate and aggregate indicators of anti-colonial space.

To set manageable parameters for our project we elected to review Caribbean maps from 1500 to 1700 available at the JCB. These totalled nearly one hundred maps covering the Caribbean or individual islands, produced by a range of mapmakers and empires for diverse audiences. At least half of these appear in the library's Luna database, and all our citations link directly to these maps online for readers’ further exploration.Footnote ³⁰ This sampling facilitated fascinating comparisons and connections that, on the whole, suggest analytical starting points for further inquiry. Readers can thus interact with the primary materials themselves and, more importantly, ponder how similar maps could serve as new sources in their own work. As a complement to the article, ample descriptions of these maps are provided in a spreadsheet of our observations and features that recurred in our analysis. Embracing the ‘Data-first manifesto’, our findings are open to all who want to use them.Footnote ³¹ In order to develop a typology and a chronology of these representations, we pooled our respective linguistic and historiographical knowledge in the JCB map room. By collectively discussing findings of presence or absence, and representations and toponyms in colonized and autonomous spaces, this thought experiment revealed important suggestions about these maps as primary sources of African and Indigenous populations.Footnote ³²

Many of our sources are thick-mapped with historical information, such as de Bry's 1594 ‘Occidentalis Americae partis’, which shows the four voyages of Columbus, or Coronelli's 1688 ‘Archipelague du Mexique’, which depicts the history of how and when each island changed imperial hands.Footnote ³³ On the other hand, many lacked these extra-geographical representations. Whether the intention of the mapmaker was to omit or include spaces of Indigenous and African peoples and their descendants, interrogating the maps allows us to get at not just the intended purposes of their creation, but ways in which various groups would have read these same spaces. For example, in the Barbadian maps mentioned above, the entire island is covered in symbols for different types of mills for crushing sugar cane.Footnote ³⁴ The various types of mills seemed to be more important to map than any other feature. To the European investor, this represented wealth and progress. To the Taínos or Caribs, each symbol represented artificial boundaries, spoiled landscapes, and homes and lifeways lost. To the enslaved, each symbol marked thousands of bodies broken in the sugar industry. Their ideas of space, antithetical to imposed property and spatial relations, did not adhere to this historic record.

Deconstructing maps in these ways allows us to explore early modern European conceptions of space based on their particular desires, and, more importantly, how those desires were bound up in the under-mapped lives of the non-Europeans who tried to survive them. Biased though they are, these maps can also enhance our understanding of the ways in which Indigenous and African people might appear on contested terrains despite being occluded by the mapmakers. The article follows absences and presences in Caribbean maps, and what they might mean in the aggregate.

III

Silences sometimes say more than words. In many early modern Caribbean maps, there is an obvious omission of references to Africans and Indigenous people who inhabited those places depicted on the maps. Information about their presence in those spaces, and European relationships to it, can be read in many of the landscapes, symbols, decorative elements, flora, fauna, and even sea monsters that dotted the Caribbean seas. Many of the maps’ special features that are related to the ways in which Indigenous people and the enslaved occupied and made use of the land have been implied rather than made explicit in the mapping.

These detailed European property and spatial ideas normalized practice of legal claims by individuals and imperial rule on terrain that was, only a century before, shown with sparse buildings and vastly untamed and unnamed interiors. Earlier maps by Benedetto Bordone published in Venice in 1528 show Caribbean islands with sparse settlement marked mostly with churches, seemingly connoting safer spaces for Europeans (Hispaniola) as opposed to the severely mountainous, cavernous, and forested Jamaica, Guadeloupe, and Martinique. They are depicted as empty spaces, although they were Indigenous strongholds at the time, and the focus of a concerted effort by the Spanish to capture and enslave these populations.Footnote ³⁵ The same mapmaker's portrayals of Jamaica fail to note Spanish presence in the island’s open spaces (such as St Vincent) that were in actuality anything but empty.

In a 1534 map also published in Venice, the island of Hispaniola is shown in much greater detail, including regional place names of both Indigenous and Spanish provenance, interior settlements, and locally specific detail of mountains, rivers, lakes, and forests.Footnote ³⁶ Both of these maps, along with a 1594 depiction of the Caribbean issued in Frankfurt, insisted on disproportionately representing Isabela, a town founded on Hispaniola's northern coast by Colón in 1494, hit twice by hurricanes, and then abandoned in 1496. These three examples might suggest over-reliance on European projections of significance drawn from travel accounts about early Spanish claims, particularly since the settlement of Isabela was a failure. This 1594 map also shows large red forts deep in the interior of Spanish colonial claims, enveloping pockets of woods or hills, beside a cartouche with docile Indigenous faces, inviting fruits, and attractive birds.Footnote ³⁷ It is of interest to note that often when Indigenous faces/bodies did appear on the geographical portions of the maps they were pictured in the decorative elements and cartouches, thus removed from their land and safely away from the European settlements upon it.

The cultivation of cash crops also speaks to Indigenous access to land, or lack thereof. The 1688 Coronelli map shows signs of the cultivation of crops such as pineapple, ginger, passionfruit, and indigo.Footnote ³⁸ A hardly recognizable map of Cuba from 1564 by Paolo di Forlani entices readers with a description of sugar, gold, cotton, and grains that the island offered.Footnote ³⁹ Another di Forlani map, this time of Hispaniola, shows a diminished (but not abandoned) Isabela. This map has greater detail of Indigenous place names and individual Spanish settlements, and perhaps most interestingly shows clearly bounded plots of land, with some that seem to be rowed with crops, including what appears to be sugar cane near Santo Domingo.Footnote ⁴⁰ These cultivars are indicative of inherently conflict-ridden European encroachment upon the interiors, upon which Indigenous populations relied as refuge from European settlements.

The presence of plants in the maps often indicated how land was, or was not, utilized. Density of trees could denote light European presence, difficult terrain, or sparse cultivation. The Fort Plantation of Barbados shows surveyed, Anglocentric property relations in 1646, barely two decades after English colonization. Cleared space includes pasturage for cattle and a ‘potato peece’; ‘fallen land’ appears with stumped trees. Structures of varying size appear on a tree-dotted landscape that adjoins the coast, though there is no reference to the slaves who likely built and toiled in the mill or saltpetre buildings portrayed. This map was in part drawn to settle an apparent property issue with a Mr Wright, who, according to the notes, had encroached on the estate.Footnote ⁴¹ A 1674 map of Barbados does show a Wright tract set back from the coast marked ‘Balises B’ in roughly the north-west section of the island near Holetown.Footnote ⁴²

Belying the impenetrable features or demographic fluctuations on some maps, an official Spanish map published in 1601 in Madrid showed no flora, mountains, or contested space, instead opting for a uniform presentation of Spanish place names across the islands that they claimed. Not only are Indigenous names broadly subdued, but the sea itself is not called Caribe.Footnote ⁴³ These were visual projections of fictive Spanish governmentality and domination, including an orderly key, actively ignoring the major imperial competition that would ravage the future of this space.Footnote ⁴⁴ Similarly, a Dutch map of Puerto Rico from 1644 not only showed extreme detail of coasts compared to earlier maps, but omitted native ‘Borichen’ references.Footnote ⁴⁵ With greater accuracy in coastal mapping and physical topography, embellishments of flora and buildings diminished significantly alongside long-used Indigenous names.Footnote ⁴⁶

However, Spanish representations of Hispaniola printed in the Americas in the mid-seventeenth century depended heavily on distorted size and thick-mapped detail to express two major anxieties facing their empire in the Caribbean. English ships of great size swarm the island, emanating as imminent threats from a featureless and empty Jamaica, taken only three years before by England amid their ‘Western Design’. The map, printed four decades before French colonization of Saint-Domingue, also magnifies the size of the small island of Tortuga in particular, owing to its disproportionate significance for early French presence on Hispaniola. Tortuga is shown with armed troops, a fort, and giant cannon, and features a large sketch of a working ingenio (sugar mill). Other small French settlements dot the western coast of the island, with large trees depicting the separation of the Spanish east from new encroachments by the enemigo frances (‘French enemy’).Footnote ⁴⁷ This map visualizes these watershed moments of Caribbean history through the lens of Spanish worries. Such exaggerated emphasis typifies the malleability of mapping to show meaning, in this case the paranoia of Spanish officials over imperial competition, which also often came at a cost to the Indigenous populations.Footnote ⁴⁸

Divided islands elsewhere, such as Saint Christophe/St Kitts, were depicted with great detail of French settlements (by a French cartographer), with English lands portrayed as far more mountainous and empty. Intriguingly, one of the major features marked by the French was their control of significant salt ponds in the east, a job that required intensive raking by the enslaved, whose presence is not indicated.Footnote ⁴⁹ A striking 1673 British map depicting profile views of all the coastlines of Montserrat from the sea shows parcelled and cultivated plots stretching up hills, with towns and ports marked by detailed buildings (such as windmills). In extraordinary detail, the map shows trees, mountains, and ravines, with a sizeable key of additional details. Perhaps to exoticize the place, the island is surrounded by mythological creatures, such as a fawn playing a pan flute, mermaids holding the flags of England, Ireland, and Wales, a monkey-like creature with perhaps a telescope, and two naked figures carrying a load of sticks who could have reflected the mapmaker's attempts at depicting Indigenous people.Footnote ⁵⁰

As with the symbology of landscape and flora, representations of fauna – both fictional and accurate – in these Caribbean maps alluded to larger ideas that underpinned empire: those of exoticized space, and the transformations of that space from being dotted haphazardly with wild animal populations, towards parcels of land filled with domesticated European animals. The way in which animal symbolism and imagery are used in the maps is indicative of knowledge (or lack thereof), and communication of that knowledge for both sea and land.Footnote ⁵¹

This knowledge starts off as coastal, and moves into the interior as more space was colonized and domesticated. Sixteenth-century representations and depictions of animals tended to be decorative or symbolic. In the seventeenth-century maps, they become more representative of actual commodities and evolving practices around animal husbandry in the Caribbean. Like native plants and people, animals in these maps are often divorced from time and space; they are symbolic more than descriptive. This indicates a historicization of these spaces with European ideas of Indigenous pasts after most of such Indigenous groups and the animals upon which they depended had been erased from the islands. The most startling example of this is in the 1676 map of the West Indies by Arent Roggeveen. The cartouche shows people and animals native to continental North America rather than to the Caribbean, among them a horned stag and a turkey.Footnote ⁵²

Another common theme is the depiction of domestication over time. Jamaica offers rich examples of this phenomenon. In a 1672 map of the island, the precinct (or parish) of St James is portrayed with an icon of a man shooting a rifle at a wild horned bull rearing up on its hind legs.Footnote ⁵³ Read together with Jamaican history, it suggests a buccaneer figure wrangling the wild cattle on which they subsisted on this island. A mere five years later, this same map was republished with some superficial changes, the most noteworthy being that the icon of the wild bull has been replaced with one of a placid sheep. A bull is drawn in the nearby precinct of St Georges, but it is calm and on all fours, next to the icon for pineapple cultivation, suggesting domesticity and order of a land that was, until very recently, more wild.Footnote ⁵⁴ In this case, these changes are most likely indicative of the 1670 treaty of Madrid between the Spanish and English, which gave the English on Jamaica the stability to stop looking outward for Spanish threat, and start looking inward. The change in how animals of the island are portrayed in the icons alludes to the greater meaning of domesticating cattle that had been allowed to roam free, and all the ecological changes that accompanied such a shift as more land was claimed, catalogued, and made unavailable to those seeking autonomous spaces.

Sea animals, in particular the fantastic ones, also feature heavily in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Caribbean maps of the JCB, and they too are indicative of, and also shaped, European attitudes towards this region. Chet Van Duzer claims that these monsters were attempts by cartographers to depict what could actually exist in the ocean's depths. They worked with limited understandings of existence, and with the underlying assumption that what exists on land must have an underwater equivalent.Footnote ⁵⁵ This explains the large number of sea-chimera found in the maps: a badger with bear claws and a serpentine tail, water dragons, and a unicorn fish, for example.Footnote ⁵⁶ Christopher Columbus, heavily influenced by the fantastical descriptions of Sir John Mandeville, wrote about these types of fantastic creatures alongside his notes on his voyages to the Americas.Footnote ⁵⁷ Mapmakers later drew from his accounts.

The fantastic sea beasts became the basis for natural history drawings on maps, another attempt to catalogue and systematize the empire. Whales often appear in prominent or significant locations. In medieval manuscripts, whales were portrayed in association with the devil, because their large forms in the deep blue were sometimes mistaken for land, luring sailors astray. They were said to jump up into the water and crash down upon ships, or drag sailors to their deaths.Footnote ⁵⁸ This, of course, spoke to the very real fear of how precarious a profession sailing was. Europeans went into these ventures expecting to be terrified, and so they were terrified by the new animals, and, by extension, by the new people they imagined encountering. This was despite the long history of Indigenous Caribbean people using canoes to safely navigate these same seas.

In several instances, fictional land-based animals from medieval fantasy and lore appear on the Caribbean maps, including manticores, griffons, fawns, various chimera, and a winged dragon. One animal, described as a Su, or Succurath, in the map's description, is part of a broader trend in mapping and artwork of the Americas, particularly towards the south. This animal, similar to a ground sloth or type of panther, is drawn as a chimera, with a bearded, humanoid face and a giant broad tail the length of its body. It appears on a map of Trinidad, an island which has had neither sloths nor panthers for as long as humans have roamed the earth.Footnote ⁵⁹ Victoria Dickenson claims that the proliferation of the Succarath and other such fantastic American beasts replicated the idea that the Americas were ‘part of a lesser creation, unfit for civilized habitation’.Footnote ⁶⁰ The animal is associated with a European judgement of the native human population, and, alongside it, the implicit fears that Europeans would similarly degenerate in this climate.

IV

While there were many conspicuous omissions and silences in the maps when it came to Indigenous and African presence, there was also a wealth of overt evidence of the ways in which these groups navigated the Caribbean in spite of the encroachment of exploitative European land-use patterns. Whereas the silences in the maps have to be carefully parsed and read against the grain, the references and allusions are better off interrogated. These allusions take the form of symbols such as native dwellings with thatched roofs or figures in Indigenous dress, decorative elements like cartouches or in the margins, place names, and script within the islands of the maps themselves.

Christopher Columbus, among other early explorers working for Castile, described an Indigenous people (Kalinago) that influenced the ‘Caribbean’ toponym (and even ‘cannibal’ nomenclature for anthropophagy).Footnote ⁶¹ This ethnonym ‘Carib’ became the name for the Caribbean region, and therefore also became the word used to describe many of the Indigenous groups that persisted alongside European expansion in the area. The toponym was thus an identifier imposed from outside.Footnote ⁶² But many Taíno words remained on specific islands in maps over the following two centuries (such as the aforementioned ‘Borichen’ for Puerto Rico). Similarly, the Spanish island of Hispaniola, home to the colony of Santo Domingo, was labelled occasionally as ‘Hayti’, a name used by the Taíno. In this map, the eastern region is labelled ‘Caribana’, with smaller islands called Cibucheira and Cubacheira, which are difficult to link with current nomenclature.Footnote ⁶³ Much of early modern ‘Caribbean’ space was inscribed with Indigenous place names,Footnote ⁶⁴ toponyms that, like ‘America’, originated in editorial licence or interpretation errors.Footnote ⁶⁵

Other cartographers partitioned these spaces within the Caribbean through further toponyms. For example, a 1598 map attributed to Metellus from the Wytfliet atlas accompanied a German translation of the monumental work of José de Acosta, and drew information from his and others’ qualitative work. In it, words linked to ‘Carib’ appeared in labels in southern Guyana, with the interior of the coast (devoid of formally labelled settlements) identified as ‘Caribana’, and south-east of Cubagua, where there is a symbol for a town named ‘Aldea de Caribes’ (‘Carib village’). South of Margarita island is another settlement simply labelled ‘Caribes’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Similarly, the 1648 map of Guadeloupe included in an atlas published in Paris notes two Carib sites: Pointe du Petit Carbet and Grand Carbet.Footnote ⁶⁷ A 1597 map from Louvain shows several Spanish towns at places with Indigenous names.Footnote ⁶⁸ Finally, Coronelli's 1688 map of the ‘Mexican archipelago’ includes several references to Carib occupation: St Vincent is labelled ‘aux Caribes’ (‘To the Caribs’). The island of Bequia is described as ‘est aux Caribes’, and there is an island off the coast of what appears to be Venezuela (New Andalucia) called ‘Isle de Caribes’. Of interest to note is the map's key in the upper right, which describes how ownership of islands is indicated on the mark: A for English islands, E for Spanish, F for French, and H for Dutch. The key does not include an indication for Indigenous occupation, which Coronelli wrote directly onto the islands themselves, making a choice to represent their presence differently on the map from European occupation.Footnote ⁶⁹ It is indicative of the attitude that Indigenous existence might be marked, but their ownership over the land unacknowledged as being on a par with European claims. It was common for maps from the same location and era to both include and omit these types of markers of Indigenous presence, suggesting intentionality on behalf of the mapmakers or those who commissioned them.

French claims in the eastern Caribbean were still contested by Indigenous populations, unlike the Greater Antilles. A 1667 map of Martinique shows far more detailed topography in the west, with diminutive physical structures of French style. In the east, small buildings denote Carib carbets, in the area called ‘Demeure des sauvages’ (‘Dwelling of savages’), a terrain that appears otherwise devoid of detail.Footnote ⁷⁰ This void could signify any number of things: places where Europeans could not or did not go and therefore had limited knowledge about; places that Europeans did not find useful to map; and/or settlements that Europeans did not recognize as civilized and thus worthy of including on the map alongside their own settlements. As an additional example, a map of Guadeloupe from the same year labels the east of the island as ‘little inhabited by the French’.Footnote ⁷¹

These ideas also came into play regarding the spaces inhabited and used by enslaved Africans and their descendants. Compared to Indigenous figures, there were relatively few maps with distinctly African bodies on them, even in the cartouches, which usually contained ahistorical personifications of the geography that pointed to previous majorities, as opposed to the present.Footnote ⁷² Richard Ligon's 1657 map of Barbados depicts two runaway slaves being chased by a slavecatcher in the less inhabited north-western part of the island. Also pictured is an enslaved African minding a camel, one of many Eurasian domesticated animals brought to the Caribbean on an experimental basis.Footnote ⁷³ There is another map in which dark-skinned bodies are engaging in work: the 1676 Roggeveen map of Curaçao depicts what appear to be slaves pulling a ship into port in the inset of St Anne's Bay, and at the bottom there are three further people engaged in some netting or trawling from the bank into the water.Footnote ⁷⁴ In the 1677 James Moxon map of Jamaica, there is a decorative element at the border of the map, of a dark-skinned male wearing very little, holding a bundle of sugar cane. In his other hand, he holds the scale of the map.Footnote ⁷⁵ But these examples are outliers, not the norm. It is more common to omit mention of the enslaved, or to couch it in terms of cultivation of labour-intensive crops, such as sugar, or resource extraction like salt pans, silver mines, or logwood clearing.Footnote ⁷⁶

On occasion, symbols were more descriptive. The action-packed Thevet map of Trinidad shows an interior that is not cultivated, and seems more the terrain of thatched Indigenous homes like carbets or bohios within the trees, contrasting with clearings containing dwellings built in European style. The same map also contains canoes rather than the European-style sailing ships, and all of the people on the map engaged in activities like fishing or preparing food over a boucan appear to be Indigenous as well. There is a battle depicted on the land between two groups of Indigenous warriors wielding spears, an approaching military from the sea via large canoe, attacking a defending force on land.Footnote ⁷⁷

A 1672 map of Jamaica by John Seller contains an inset of a couple of figures who were meant to be Indigenous (signified with a bow). The woman carries a shallow basket filled with what appear to be custard apples (or sweetsop), a native fruit that the Spanish had prized enough to take from the island and cultivate in their holdings in Asia.Footnote ⁷⁸ The aforementioned 1688 map of the whole Caribbean by Coronelli is illustrated with fruits of the terrain, the margins featuring ornate sketches of ginger, indigo, passionfruit, and pineapples, with sketches of Indigenous people apparently picking them.Footnote ⁷⁹ These maps could be a reference to European knowledge of Indigenous crop cultivation, or might indicate that Indigenous people were forced by European planters to use their knowledge of the land for European profit, in the same ways that these planters exploited enslaved Africans’ knowledge of speciality crops.Footnote ⁸⁰ Even after colonial actors removed the Indigenous population from an island, evidence of their former presence persisted in unexpected places. For example, in a 1667 map of Marie Galant, many coastal places are marked ‘passage pour canots’, or canoes, accessible only via traditional transport. In a northern coastal region of this map, two warring parties appear near two place names titled ‘massacre’, indicating violence.Footnote ⁸¹

African presence is far more clearly indicated in the toponyms of these sixteenth- and seventeenth-century maps. In the 1625 Joannes de Laet map of the Caribbean, Coro, a maroon settlement on what is now mainland Venezuela, is indicated on the map with a symbol for a village.Footnote ⁸² The settlement's proximity to Curaçao made it particularly noteworthy for the Dutch, who showed interest in the island during the Eighty Years War, and would transform the island into the centre of the Dutch slave trade by the 1660s. Coro would become the maroon community of refuge for the enslaved who could reach it.Footnote ⁸³

Jamaica, too, was home to widespread maroon activity at this time, and the map collections reflect this. In 1655, the British wrested Jamaica from the Spanish, and, after a short resistance, the Spanish colonists left the island for other Spanish territories, while those formerly enslaved by them fled into the mountainous central regions and to the north, joining existing maroon communities. In L. van Anse and Nicolaes Visscher's 1680 map of Jamaica, there is a ‘Runaway Bay’ on the north coast.Footnote ⁸⁴ This bay is also noted in Vicenzo Coronelli's 1692 map.Footnote ⁸⁵ It still exists now, a nod to the escape route that runaways used after control of the island transitioned to the English. Several maps of Jamaica signal the presence of autonomous African communities, noted in the ‘Tabula Iamaicae insulae’ (1678) and ‘An exact mapp of Iamaicae’ (1683) as ‘The Banditi’.Footnote ⁸⁶ In 1660, the British recognized these runaway communities with a series of treaties designed to allow British settlers peace while they cultivated the island.

As the British developed Jamaica's sugar industry, their land use and increasing population of enslaved prompted an increase in maroon activity as well. Between 1673 and 1690, the island saw a series of slave insurrections and armed rebellions. Many of them were at least partially successful, resulting in hundreds of liberated formerly enslaved Africans and their descendants. This coincided with a new mapping trend of the island. English maps from this period contain many features which could be considered thick-mapping, most likely indicative of English aims to acquire and disseminate geographic knowledge of a formerly Spanish territory which had not been mapped in as much detail. This demonstrated their ambitions of colonial authority in the island, and is reflective of the centrality of Jamaica in British colonial design.

In 1686, the British Jamaican governors ordered a series of raids on the Windward Maroons in the Blue Mountains. Philip Lea's map from this time points out these fortified maroon strongholds (‘Negro Palink’ and ‘Old Palink’, from the Spanish word palenque, for the fortified hideouts of maroon groups). It also contains geographical features named ‘Negro Valley’ and multiple ‘Negro Rivers’, alluding to land and waterways used by maroons on the move.Footnote ⁸⁷ After the 1690 slave rebellion on Sutton Plantation in Clarendon parish, more than 200 self-emancipated former slaves joined this palenque, which would later grow into Cudjoe's Town (later renamed Trelawny Town).Footnote ⁸⁸

Edward Slaney's 1678 map of Jamaica contains labels for both a ‘Negro River’ and a ‘Negro Savanna’ in the east, near where Nanny Town, a maroon village which operated at the same time as Cudjoe's Town, would later take shape.Footnote ⁸⁹ Both Nanny Town and Cudjoe's Town would become key players in the Maroon Wars, a series of conflicts between the maroon communities of Jamaica and the island's British colonial officials from 1728 to 1740.Footnote ⁹⁰ By 1696, territories of both Windward and Leeward Maroons made it onto a map of the island through names of rivers, valleys, and savannahs.Footnote ⁹¹ In many cases like the ‘Palinks’ and ‘Banditi’ of Jamaica, a certain breadth and depth of knowledge of each language and region is required to recognize the significance of the terms, allowing them to hide in plain view to the average European reader. This is comparable to the carbets, headquarters of the Indigenous Kalinago, quietly noted along the coast of French Guadeloupe in multiple maps.Footnote ⁹² Other maps, such as Peyrounin's 1667 ‘L'isle de la Guadeloupe’, indicate entire territories under Indigenous control.Footnote ⁹³

Overall, when it comes to the presence of Africans and their descendant populations in this Caribbean map sample, there are far more explicit references to self-emancipated Africans than to the enslaved in the iconography, and especially in the toponyms. As these groups of self-emancipated formerly enslaved and their descendants were more immediately problematic and posed more of a threat than the enslaved for the colonizing populations, this hardly comes as a surprise. References to the enslaved tended to be couched in terms of land use and resources. Many maps used different ways to identify plantation spaces, from dotted lines around plots, to marking out the various types of mills used in sugar production, to segmenting islands by ownership, yet the absence of slave quarters or other visual representation of the enslaved is conspicuous when compared to the number of maps which allude to runaway slaves, or maroons and their autonomous spaces.

It seems that the vast majority of references to Africans and their descendants in the maps was in the structures they were forced to build while enslaved, or in the nuisance they represented to slaveholders when they self-emancipated and joined runaway communities. The reasons for this vary, depending on who created the maps, for which audiences the maps were intended, and for what purposes. Some maps actively minimized all appearance of risk on behalf of investors, while other maps made these threats posed to planters by runaways explicit so that they could justify asking for armed assistance and royal intervention, such as would happen with the Maroon Wars in Jamaica in the eighteenth century.

V

Early modern Caribbean maps show ample evidence of enslaved people – the very colonial built environs demarcated by European property claims – and thus also erasures of earlier Indigenous inhabitants, though their place names often remained. Plantation landscapes, mills, salt ponds, and harbours all appear as unattributed evidence of slaves’ exterior lives and labour. These representations say less about their internal lives, though their terrains of resistance appear as wilful transgressions of imperial bounds. Maroons were often heavily mapped, except for instances in which mapmakers deliberately avoided them in order to communicate projections of European dominance.

Before the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment thoroughly rationalized maps into more uniform units, early modern Caribbean mapmakers garishly adorned them with flora, fauna, Indigenous and African figures, and place names that projected fugitive landscapes, consumption, and desires. Thick-mapped portrayals conveyed new knowledge alongside embellished scale, space, and notions of control, encapsulating tensions between the mystery and mastery of the colonial Caribbean. Extra-textual information drawn from lived experiences also related values and expectations that influenced future European endeavours in the physical world of the Americas. The result was informative spectacle that summarized, theorized, and modified real people and places, enabling ethnocides and concomitant environmental transformation by competing empires.

Developments in mapping practices were essential to a spatial history that created a Caribbean known as an exoticized space for coveted commodities that were obtained in vast quantities through suppression and domination of Indigenous and African peoples. They were more often proscriptive and prescriptive rather than neutrally descriptive. As such, maps offer another source which can be read against the grain of European silences or under-representations to find evidence of lives of oppressed populations under duress who left little documentary record. Many documentary records share these complications, while maps differ enough from written archives to add valuable depth to our evidentiary corpora. Beyond visualizations, early modern Caribbean maps offer insights into the lived spatial experiences of European projections of desire and design.