Chapter 3 engages with literary criticism’s argument that English national imagining became increasingly spatialised under Elizabeth Tudor. Critics argue that cartography and chorography introduced a new spatial awareness into English national consciousness. This criticism, which ignores Scotland, misrecognises as merely ‘national’ the imperial connotations of ‘British’ in the sixteenth century. The chapter shows that sixteenth-century chorographic British antiquarianism is shot through with both nostalgia and imperial ambition: ancient place-names and local legends fill the idea of England with the immanent presence of the British past and the promise of a pan-insular, imperial future. John Dee’s claims for English sea sovereignty over the Arctic and the Americas depended on claims to Scotland. Chapter 2 shows how Spenser’s The Faerie Queene conjures the vision of an Anglo-British imperial island in which Scotland becomes inconceivable. Spenser fuses river poetry, chorography and classical poetry with these texts on naval power, maritime law and English sea-sovereignty to shape the love of Florimell and Marinell as an allegory of Chastity as key to English insular empire.

The chapter examines the efforts of a group of veterans from earlier expeditions to capitalize on their knowledge of Asia and/or routes between the Indies, while grappling with their relatively modest position within the hierarchy of meritorious. The chapter argues that such a hierarchy became increasingly clear during the 1540s, due to the viceregal authorities’ efforts to identify and hierarchically order New Spain’s conquistadores, primer pobladores, and other beneméritos who had served the Crown. Against the background of these initiatives, it considers the efforts of men such as Andrés de Urdaneta, Guido de Lavezaris, García de Escalanate Alvarado, Castaneda de Nájera, and Juan Pablo de Carrión – who all fell within this third category of meritorious – to stand out among those included in the register by presenting themselves as veterans. Analyzing their interactions with the viceregal authorities and referring to reports produced during the 1550s and 1560s, the chapter reveals how the men’s drive for social advancement inspired them to fuel interest in Spanish expansion into the Pacific. In the process, they presented various visions of the Pacific and the potential benefits of New Spain’s connections to Asia.

The chapter explores how the production of cosmographical knowledge and acts of self-fashioning interacted in negotiations over royal capitulaciones, which were contracts between the Crown and private individuals that permitted the latter to act on the Crown’s behalf in matters such as exploration. After a brief discussion of prior Spanish efforts to reach Asia, the chapter then concentrates on the legal cases that were argued and decided during the 1530s and early 1540s concerning the right to explore the regions in the Pacific Northwest and who was to be recognized as the discoverer (descubridor) of this part of the world. The analysis presented here shows how the efforts of Hernán Cortés, Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, and others to prove they deserved to be recognized as discoverers had an impact on the mapping of the Pacific Northwest and left deep marks on the laws of the Indies.

There is a wealth of literature on Antarctic research. Many overviews on the nature of Antarctica, cartography, its geology and glaciation, inhabitants and visitors, and cultural perspectives have been published recently.1 The first history of polar exploration of Europeans was published in 1756.2 Since then, many more Western historical overviews have been published, and we also have a chronological list of expeditions to Antarctica as well as good coverage in encyclopedias.3 In addition to these publications, there are several studies of the significance of ice and the development of natural sciences in the understanding of the physical nature of Antarctica. There are also some important recents works on the history of science which have not been fully integrated with the histories of exploration and discovery.

The interconnections within the natural world as observed by European explorers and armchair cosmographers connected meaningfully in the eighteenth century with the longer history of early modern cosmopolitanism, relying on an evolving understanding of the globe and its peoples in all their particularities and diversity. This chapter examines the tenets of eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism through the natural sciences by examining how individual actors, largely based in Europe, explored their world and described its geographies. Working across the disciplines of cartography, natural history, and ethnography, these individuals aspired to be inclusive within a cosmopolitan frame but often struggled to articulate a universal principle about whose knowledge should be included and whose voices should be excluded. These practices became critical sites of cosmopolitan contestation as they underlined a highly ambivalent attitude toward local sources of knowledge while proclaiming Europe’s unequivocal ability to describe and depict nature and space with a particularly vehement denigration of the tropical regions of the globe and their inhabitants.

The first chapter describes the rough and tumble of Coleridge’s rambles between 1794 and 1804. The chapter opens by placing these excursions within a culture of walking. It depicts his propensity to be his own path-maker rather than follow either the directives of the picturesque guides or the assigned routes of maps. Entries in his pocket notebooks reveal Coleridge’s understanding of a landscape based both upon what his eyes could see and what his feet could register. In many respects, he becomes a surveyor who measures the terrain with his boots. Often modeling his understanding of a landscape on the spirit of geometric exercises, Coleridge measured and counted his paces over a portion of ground in order to observe its lines and angles.

This chapter introduces the readers to the relationship between toponymy and cartography. Although given for granted, place names are an essential component of a map. Toponyms serve important cartographic/topographic functions, such as helping users to search for and to locate places on a map. They also have an affective role; the act of seeing place names on a map evokes an emotional input that (re)connects a person with a place. Both toponyms and maps have the ideological function of possession and control of territories. This is especially true in colonial contexts. The chapter makes a note that maps are not a modern invention; they have been produced since ancient times and, hence, are useful in studying the denominations of old place names and the geopolitical realities of the past. In the final part of this chapter, the authors turn their attention to phantom place names, i.e., places that have been believed to be real and, although charted on maps, turned out to be non-existent. They are part of a broader set of legendary and literary place names that evoke what is called the ‘feeling of place’ and reveal much of the human nature (e.g., the love for exploration and the desire for beauty/earthly pleasures).

This chapter addresses the evolution of the crime fiction genre in Latin America by examining the relationship between three of the continent’s major cities and three historical moments. The following case studies chosen are: Buenos Aires in the stories of Seis problemas para Don Isidro Parodi (Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi, 1942) by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares; Havana in Armando Cristóbal Pérez’s novel La ronda de los rubies (The Ring of Rubies, 1973); and Mexico City in Días de combate (Days of Combat, 1976) by Paco Ignacio Taibo II. The chapter traces a textual trajectory from Borges and Bioy’s parodic games with the English models of mystery fiction to Taibo’s scathing national questioning of the Mexican neo-crime fiction, passing through Cristóbal’s politically committed and Cuban revolutionary crime fiction. That trajectory demonstrates the flexibility of the crime fiction genre, which has allowed it to branch out and adapt to the literary needs of different authors and contexts in the period between 1930 and 1980 in Latin American literature.

Seventeenth-century Cartagena de Indias exemplified the multiracial life of imperial Iberian port cities. Few European doctors served the newly cosmopolitan areas of the empire that fostered alarming new experiences of climate, disease, and injury. Surgeons and herbalists of African descent competed for Iberian clients and played significant roles in defining the spaces of a port city vulnerable to all sorts of invasion. Europeans entrusted their ill bodies to casta healers while fearing death at the hands of those healers’ colleagues, who might be motivated to revenge by the slave system or by the internal tensions of European politics or marriages. This essay teases out the gendered competition among casta surgeons and herbalists who told stories with their words and movements through hospitals, jails, city walls, neighborhoods, churches, and homes of the port city. It draws especially on the trials of herbalist Paula de Eguiluz and surgeon Diego Lopez whose stories allay and arouse the fears of the Iberians they lived with and treated.

This chapter begins with surveyors Alexander and James Gerard, and their attempts to prove that they had climbed higher than Alexander von Humboldt. In examining the measuring practices of East India Company surveyors, the chapter especially deals with moments when scientific instruments were found to be inadequate. These are revealing of the importance instruments played in establishing scientific authority in a world in which the senses were unreliable. This chapter firstly considers responses to damaged instruments, and attempts at repair. This is followed by a discussion of surveyors’ fieldbooks and inscriptive practices. It concludes with an examination of ongoing problems – both conceptual and material – with instruments designed in Europe by those with no experience of the Himalaya. The chapter argues that the staggered recognition of the true scale of the Himalaya reveals multiple levels of displacement in scientific practice: between those in the mountains, those in Calcutta and those in London. In so doing, it emphasises the laboriousness of the instrumental measurements necessary to impose, if incompletely, a form of universality that made global comparisons possible.

By dating two newly discovered Conrad drawings, Chapter 3 connects Conrad’s unfinished novel about a painter – The Sisters – to his interest in drawing. The Sisters is a much more complicated fragment than hitherto acknowledged. The text relates to contemporary debates, Conrad’s life and many of his works, both visual and verbal. Written during the advent of modern visual art, The Sisters is of further interest in its portrayal of Stephen as a modern artist. The metaphors on painting Conrad used in the Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ relate to this discussion: they contextualize and oppose Stephen’s thoughts about what it means to be an artist, and delimit the extent to which Conrad embraced all notions of modernity and the so-called “end of art.”

Although doodling is a break from putting words on the page, it is not necessarily a pause from writing, because the process includes reflection. This chapter explores the ways doodling and writing may have intertwined for Conrad, who – like his characters Blunt, Razumov and Stevie – doodled; in the Shadow-Line holograph there are 109 doodles. By moving his doodles from the margins of the manuscript to the center of discussion, a visual portrait emerges of an artist for whom “procrastination” and productivity worked in delayed symbiosis.

The third part of the book, on “Place”, is made up of chapters grouped by their relation to matters of space and geography. Chapter 9 analyses the use of topographic, cartographic and antiquarian sources, amplifying the study made by the cartographic historian J.H. Andrews in 1960, which has never been supplanted. It extends Andrews’ coverage, which omitted the Scottish portions of the Tour, and considers its relation to other topographers not previously mentioned in this context, as well as the products of mapmakers such as Herman Moll and John Senex. The chapter supplies new evidence on the use Defoe made of maps, and offers a fuller comparison with the works of his principal rival, the Journey of John Macky (1714-23). Finally, this section endorses the verdict of Andrews, that “In spite of its weaknesses the ‘Tour’ remains a great pioneer work of economic geography.”