Travel Writing and Cartography

“Treasure Maps: Cartography in the Hands of the Virginia Company and the East India Company, 1600-1625”

“…575 As it "sets the stage and brings a real or fictional traveller's world into focus", the theatrical company map enables potential investors and colonists to simulate a first involvement or contact experience with Virginia, possibly teasing them into fully committing to the company. 576 In that sense, cartographic theatrical displays were a way for Britons "to travel on the spot". 577 They also reveal the "personal, even emotive nature of English colonial support".…”

“…In a chapter on "Travel Writing and Cartography", Jordana Dym explains that cartographic and textual discourse were increasingly fused in the early modern period, with authors such as Hakluyt and Purchas compiling scattered "relations", "descriptions" and maps to bring them together in unifying volumes. 738 Remembering and re-membering the different parts of British experience in Virginia and the East Indies, works such as Hakluyt's Principall Navigations or Strachey's Historie of Travell possess a "narrative drive which ties the disparate and scattered records of English travels" in a "teleological account of progress and growth". 739 As Nandini Das more specifically shows, Hakluyt's work was a quest to unite the scattered parts of British overseas history sewn together into a single corpus.…”