Captain James Cook’s third voyage (1776–1780) helped shape British maps of the Northwest Coast of America, but those maps were built on contested and incomplete knowledge. This project examines two parallel threads: the European geographical understanding of the region during the first wave of Russian colonial intrusion (1750–1800), and the much longer history of Native American map-making and wayfinding practices (1680–1980), using a collection held by the historian G. Malcolm Lewis. The research challenges the idea that the Northwest Coast was “unearthed” land awaiting European cartography, and it questions the assumption that maps are neutral data sources. Instead, it reads maps as products of a dynamic interplay between medium, image, and cultural context. This is fundamental, curiosity-driven research with no immediate practical application. However, by exposing how colonial maps were shaped by ideology, material constraints, and aesthetic choices, the project could reshape how historians, educators, and museum curators understand the relationship between cartography and empire. Similar historical work on map-making has influenced how contested territories are taught in schools and represented in public archives.
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Global Prospects / Local Grounds is concerned with British involvement in the construction of the image of the Northwest Coast of America at and around the time of Captain James Cook’s third voyage of discovery (1776–1780). It will focus on the holdings in the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress. The project will be composed of two interrelated parts. Global Prospects (1750–1800) will examine British geographical knowledge of the Northwest Coast broadly synchronous with the first wave of European intrusion into the area, led by Russian colonialists. Local Grounds (1680–1980) will take a diachronic approach, exploring the collection of the historian of cartography, G. Malcolm Lewis, relating to Native American map-making practices and systems of wayfinding. The dialogue between the synchronic and diachronic research fields will identify and challenge the notional status of the Northwest Coast prior to European exploration as unearthed land, anticipating a primary cartography. It will also challenge the status of maps as merely sources of data. Drawing on the art historian, Hans Belting’s iconological methods, maps will be read in relation to a dynamic nexus of medium, image, and body. Connecting the two research fields, Global Prospects / Local Grounds does not seek to find a tidy resolution. The cultural interface between the coloniser and the colonised is always disjointed. Instead it seeks to pose a series of questions, specifically around the different grounds—evidential, ideological, material, and aesthetic—on which late-eighteenth-century maps of the Northwest Coast of America were based.
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