Geography and Persuasion:
Maps in British Colonial New York

Sara Stidstone Gronim

I send a Map by Mr. Spragg," Governor Thomas Dongan of New York wrote to his London superiors in 1687, "whereby your Lo[rdshi]ps may see the several Govermts &c. how they lye where the Beaver hunting is & where it will bee necessary to erect our Country Forts for the securing of beaver trade & keeping the Indians in community with us." And, he added, "you will see in what narrow bounds we are cooped up." Like colonial officials elsewhere in the first British empire, officials in New York sent maps to the Board of Trade and Whitehall to argue for more attention, intervention, and resources from the crown. Between the English seizure of the area from the Dutch in 1664 and the beginning of the American Revolution, local officials sent maps to persuade their metropolitan superiors of New York's importance at a time when it was neither a large nor a wealthy colony. Officials sent maps to demonstrate the "naturalness" of proposed solutions to local political problems when a geographic argument would serve such a purpose. Maps, like official reports, private letters, and published tracts, were part of the armamentarium of political persuasion. 1

1

Maps are particularly suited to be instruments of persuasion. The relationships among elements on a map leap to the eye, giving maps a legibility sometimes difficult to achieve in words. However, although all maps represent spatial relationships, they do so to culturally specific ends using culturally specific conventions. The states of early modern Europe used maps to facilitate the internal organization of their polities and their mercantile and military expansion. Early modern European mapmakers thus made maps to aid navigation, cadastral record keeping, and military planning and for princely display. Such maps drew their authority from particular practices in the representation of geography. Conventions that represented the mathematical relationships—longitude and latitude, measured distance and compass direction—among natural features and, increasingly, a panoptic perspective signified to early modern map readers that maps were reliable representations of the physical world. 2

. . .