CHAPTER 3

Lines on a Map

Crafting and Contesting Borders in Guillaume Delisle’s and Herman Moll’s Early Eighteenth-Century Maps of North America

ALEX ZUKAS

Two prominent eighteenth-century cartographers provide a rich archive for examining how early modern Europeans applied an understanding of cartographically expressed political space to the landscape of a continent where such an epistemology was unknown and where it did not fit the political realities on the ground.1 Herman Moll (ca. 1654–1732), a German engraver who immigrated to London in the late seventeenth century and became Geographer to King George I of Great Britain after 1715, and Guillaume Delisle (1675–1726), who became First Geographer to King Louis XV of France in 1718, were the foremost European mapmakers of the early eighteenth century.2 Both were strong proponents and propagandists, respectively, of British and French imperial prerogatives. Their maps foregrounded Britain’s and France’s foreign economic and political interests in an age of fierce imperial rivalries and sought to legitimize British and French territorial claims in North America in what became a “map war,” which Delisle initiated in 1703 and which lost steam after Moll’s final cartographic response in 1720. Both Delisle and Moll engaged in what American studies scholar Rich Heyman terms “re-territorialization (that is, a reconfiguring of territoriality),” an “attempt to territorialize what was already territorialized, namely native landscapes.”3 Such reterritorialization first involved deterritorialization, the elimination of boundaries that signified sovereign control cartographically, and focused on reterritorializing the land claims of their imperial adversaries.

Borders on most seventeenth- and eighteenth-century colonial maps produced in Europe appeared as deceptively precise boundary lines “meant to establish clear-cut territorial jurisdiction and legal and political sovereignty confirmed cartographically.”4 Visualizing definitive borders reflected the wishes of an emerging cartographic public of politicians, lawyers, merchants, and intellectuals—Moll’s and Delisle’s customers—rather than the realities and actual limits of European state power in an Indigenous-colonial setting and the further reality that borders have never been “unchanging, uncontested, and unproblematic.”5 In contrast to assertions of political sovereignty coded cartographically by borders, interracial, interethnic, and interpolitical contact zones, what Samuel Truett in this volume calls “spaces of entanglement,” often occurred in what historians Colin Calloway, Claudio Saunt, and Juliana Barr call Native “homelands” and what historical anthropologist Robbie Ethridge calls “shatter zones” brought on by European and Indigenous rivalries.6

This chapter will argue that, to support the expansive claims of their respective governments, Moll and Delisle defined and contested territorial space, boundaries, and border-making in North America in a number of crucial maps that focused on European claims to territorial sovereignty and the deterritorialization of Native realms as borderless regions, thereby coding such realms as cartographically and sovereignly open.7 However, for their colonies to be secure and prosperous, Britain, France, and even Spain needed to form and maintain alliances with the powerful Native nations that lived in or near territories that they claimed for their European sovereign. This political and economic reality made the boundaries engraved on maps of North America far more porous than they appeared, especially with outline coloring.8 It is worth noting in the context of European imperial conflict that, in the early and mid-eighteenth century, independent Native Americans still had effective control of half of the Western Hemisphere and were a force to be considered in any imperial calculation. Consequently, they were not erased from these maps but how they appeared on them aligned with the colonial purposes and presence of the respective imperial power.9 In many respects both cartographers, and likely their readers and promoters, succumbed to the logical fallacy that maps produce territories, that maps permit territorial control, reproducing longstanding problems in the history and historiography of cartography.10 A related issue concerns the idea of an anticipatory geography that “served to frame colonial territories in the minds of statesmen and territorial speculators back in Europe. Maps were the first step in the appropriation of territory.”11

Both Delisle and Moll consciously developed the maps that are the subject of this chapter as symbolic resources to support the empire-building of their respective nations and weaponized them as part of an ongoing ideological struggle over colonial borders and European sovereignty in North America. Compiling and revising their partisan maps involved a recursive practice that was in a dialectical relationship with the lived world of physicality, politics, and political economy. French and British travelers, agents, and explorers culled and condensed the vast amount of information that they acquired daily in explorations of the physical world of North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries into memoires and reports that Delisle and Moll translated into cartographic representations. This translation was made easier by the fact that the men who compiled and wrote these reports were instructed to determine their geographic locations astronomically and to narrate their travels with geographic-territorial ends in mind.12 Based on their respective French and British sources, Delisle’s and Moll’s cartographic representations circulated in European political and diplomatic arenas, and their “map wars” were bound up in complex ways with actual wars, highlighted the current political, economic, and military struggles in North America, and expressed the expansionist dreams of French and British leaders in the early eighteenth century.13All in all, contrary to poststructuralist claims, Delisle’s and Moll’s struggles show that, with all their border-making and terraqueous claims, maps on their own do not produce territory.

Delisle’s Carte du Mexique et de la Floride (1703)

In 1703 Delisle compiled information collected by French explorers, especially René-Robert Cavelier, sieur de la Salle, Pierre Le Moyne, sieur d’Iberville, and Pierre-Charles Le Sueur to publish a Map of Mexico and Florida and English Territories and the Islands of the Antilles.14 It was issued two years into the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714; Britain involved 1702–1713), known by the English in the North American theater as Queen Anne’s War and by the French as the Second Intercolonial War. The map located the course and delta of the Mississippi River more accurately than previous maps, represented Delisle’s interpretation of the colonial claims of Spain and England (an emphasis of its title), placed the western border of Spanish Florida at the Pecos and Rio Grande Rivers, and triggered a “map war” soon after the War of the Spanish Succession ended. While the major pitched battles of the war occurred in western and central Europe and war in North America took the form of destructive, mostly hit-and-run raids by colonial militias and their more numerous Indigenous allies and privateers in the Caribbean and coastal Atlantic, the war’s underlying cause was the possibility that the Spanish monarchy and territories could become merged with France’s monarchy and overseas territories. That is, while its ostensible cause involved dynastic issues, what led to warfare were imperial issues that entailed the disposition and composition of the Spanish empire in North America, the supply of slaves to that empire, and the borders of the Spanish, French, and British colonial claims there. In 1702, as the French were allied with the Spanish and positioned themselves to intervene in the affairs of Spain’s empire, the Spanish Crown granted the French Guinea Company the Asiento, an exclusive contract to import enslaved Africans into Spain’s American colonies.15 As historian Phillippe R. Girard notes, “French-British rivalries were nothing new, but a new development was the growing importance of imperial rivalries as a motive for going to war and [colonies] as a theater of operations.”16

Delisle’s map was an early expression of the official French position that the entire watershed of a river or lake in Indigenously settled lands was encompassed by the right of Christian, European “discovery,” which deterritorialized Native peoples.17 He applied this doctrine to reterritorialize the claims of all three colonial powers. For the French-allied Spanish, it meant that the borders of Spanish Florida extended as far as west, east, and north as the length of the rivers that drained into the Mississippi south of the Ohio River, thus creating a region that extended from the Ohio River to the Gulf of Mexico and included most of Texas and the southern plains, while English claims extended as far as west as the headwaters of rivers that drained from the Appalachians to the Atlantic. The French based their claims to the region around the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River on the proclamation of Simon François Daumont, Sieur de St. Lusson (d. after 1677), in 1671 that, having traversed the region from Montreal to Lake Superior by water, he took possession of Lakes Huron and Superior and “all other Countries, rivers, lakes and tributaries, contiguous and adjacent thereunto, as well as discovered as to be discovered,” which included the Ohio River and upper reaches of the Mississippi River. St. Lusson’s extension of this doctrine to undiscovered lands of course made a mockery of its premise that discovery was necessary to legitimate a territorial claim.18

This theory of de jure terraqueous colonial possession suited the French situation, which required travel by North American rivers and lakes and eliminated the need to actually traverse, occupy, or even “discover” terrain far away from river banks in order to claim it. Estimates of the European population in Canada in 1700 was 6,200 persons, not enough to make much of an impression on the landscape or “discover,” claim, or defend much of it.19 Consequently, Delisle peppered the landscape of Florida, New Mexico, and New France’s northern Mississippi Valley with the French names of Indigenous peoples, whose labor power and military acumen were crucial to the de facto success (or defeat) of the French colonial enterprise, concentrating their names along or near rivers while indicating the existence of only three Native bands in the British colonies. He deterritorialized them by not drawing borders around any Indigenous names that would have signaled to his readers that they held inviolate sovereign territories protected against European territorial claims, including the Natchez, Choctaw, and Chickasaw whose settled way of life he indicated with teepee-like symbols, or the numerous “wandering” people in what is now Texas. Delisle placed the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) around the Finger Lakes, which he located within the borders of New France, and he gave no indication that they controlled territory further west in the Ohio River valley. The absence of borders around Indigenous names in the Delisle map conveyed de facto occupancy or presence, not the sense of Haudenosaunee dynamism or expansion that Charles Prior maintains concerning the Mitchell map he discusses in this volume. The attentive map reader would notice, however, that Delisle indicated Haudenosaunee residence with the symbol for town that he used for European settlements, rather than the teepee symbol he used for other Indigenous peoples, subtly distinguishing them from other Native Americans.

The string of forts and outposts on his map highlighted the fact that French, British, Spanish, and Portuguese imperial holdings were “islands of occupation surrounded by a [Indigenous] sea of land”20 within “a networked nodal world of trade, diplomacy, dispossession, coercion, and cross-cultural mixing and violence.”21 France’s nodal approach to spatial control was an imperial geography that relied both on control of strategic trading and military routes, rather than absolute control of large swaths of territory, and on negotiation with Native peoples to gain access to Indigenous trade networks and military resources.22 Delisle did show the “Route that the French take to get to Carolina” from Illinois, which followed the Tennessee River from the Mississippi to the Appalachians. Much of the information on the map came from Native American sources transmitted by French missionaries’ and traders’ reports to the French state, which Delisle could access via his position at court and as a member of the French Royal Academy of Sciences who had direct contact with government ministers who requested specific works from him.23

To support French claims to Florida, Delisle’s map showed La Salle’s abandoned fort (“Fort François”) on Baye St. Louis (today Lavaca Bay in Texas), recently founded French forts in Mobile and Biloxi Bays, and an unnamed fort (Fort de La Boulaye) in the Mississippi River delta. Encoding all these features, including explicitly labeling the “Mouth of the Mississippi” River, gave cartographic shape to La Salle’s idea in the early 1680s and Iberville’s from the early 1700s that French control of the mouth of the Mississippi River would provide a suitable location for attacking Spanish provinces in northern Mexico and gaining control of its productive silver mines through an alliance with the Native peoples in the area who were indignant over their enslavement by the Spanish.24 Indeed, Delisle noted the location of numerous silver mines across the border in Mexico, perhaps to incentivize French adventurers to ally with Native Americans who raided those provinces on a regular basis, implying that such a “paper border” was permeable, negotiable, and impermanent.25 In the context of a major inter-imperialist war, Delisle’s titular focus on Florida, Mexico, and the British colonies, and their prominent boundaries on the map, showed where future French colonial interest lay.

Moll’s A New and Exact Map of the Dominions of the King of Great Britain on ye Continent of North America (1715)

British elites, however, did not accept “discovery” or French riverine theory as a foundation for territorial claims. They maintained that in addition to letters patent from the Crown, symbolic markers, formal declarations of British sovereignty, and occasional purchases of land from “those too powerful to displace by force of arms or who might have stronger claims to their lands in the eyes of the English,” physical settlement by (non-Indigenous) people and the establishment of permanent (non-Indigenous) settlements legitimized a European claim to American territory, setting up a confrontation with France over their respective colonial borders.26 This argument played to Britain’s strength: English colonies had an estimated European and African population of 284,000 people in 1700 with 12,000 people alone in tiny South Carolina, where most of the place names had European derivation.27

In 1715 Herman Moll published A New and Exact Map of the Dominions of the King of Great Britain on ye Continent of North America as a direct response to Delisle’s 1703 map. This map expressed the vocal concerns of colonial interests that France was confining Britain to the Atlantic littoral while setting up a vast empire in the interior of the continent for itself.28 In 1713, the Treaty of Utrecht ended the War of the Spanish Succession for Britain, but failed to define the boundaries in the St. Lawrence region and between Carolina and Florida. Moll’s map fanned the dispute between France and Great Britain over the unsettled boundaries. Moll asserted a particular postwar reterritorialization on the map by provocatively extending New Scotland’s (present-day Maine, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia), New England’s, and New York’s borders to include French-claimed territories on the south bank of the St. Lawrence River, which the English had long coveted but not settled. He did show how settled the region claimed by Britain was by naming numerous towns throughout New England, port cities along the coastline, and various inland counties.

One border did not show up on Moll’s map. While he indicated the location of “Susquehannock, An Indian Fort,” which in French and Haudenosaunee understanding marked the western border of Pennsylvania, he drew no border there.29 Beyond the fort was the homeland of the Haudenosaunee, which Moll deterritorialized by placing it within the clearly engraved borders of Pennsylvania and Maryland, indicating that it lay within the bordered “Dominions of the King of Great Britain.” In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, European geographers were uncertain about the extent and location of the Haudenosaunee. A 1701 geography text, which Moll knew quite well and for which he engraved the maps, conveyed a generally negative and condescending attitude toward the Haudenosaunee that did not suggest any notion of sovereignty and stated that “Irocoisia, or Iroquois, [is] a Country, whose Situation is differently express’d in several Maps.”30

On his map Moll engraved “Iroquois” in large letters in an arc southeast of Frontenac Lake (now Lake Ontario) and composed a long note under their name that he took great care not to extend beyond the northern border of Pennsylvania and the southern border of Maryland.

Moll’s note filled their homeland with English words and purpose, highlighting their value as military allies in imperial conflict with the French: “The Iroquois consist of four Cantons, Govern’d by so many Kings and are all hearty friends to ye English: those Princes came into England in 1710 to offer their service agt [against] ye French in Canada and had it not been for ye miscarriage of our Expedition to Quebec in 1711, those People would have been of great service to us, for they joyn’d General Nicholson with 2000 men on his March to attack Monreal [Montreal].”

The episode with the “Iroquois kings” is instructive regarding the differences between official and general public understandings of colonial affairs. Attempts in the early eighteenth century to forge links between Britain and the Haudenosaunee had mixed success with colonial officials and the public at large. Moll mentioned the major instance in the long notation on this map cited above. The 1701 geography text with Moll’s maps was republished and expanded in 1709 and the descriptions of the Haudenosaunee became more xenophobic and overwrought while mentioning their councils and highlighting their long-distance military expeditions and purported cruelty.31 This view of the Haudenosaunee circulated widely in Britain on the eve of the visit of the “Four Iroquois Kings” whom Moll memorialized in that long note. A detailed study of the episode concluded that, in popular media, “the figures of the kings were ambiguous, contradictory, and half realized; the new view of Indians as legitimate agents of state power jostled uncomfortably with the older idea that Indians were simple and savage.”32 Colonial governors organized the visit in the hope of getting royal support for an attack on Canada and did all they could to create the impression of an official state visit, but what is significant is that the organizers “had little hope of finding allies among the leading sachems of the confederacy. Instead they found supporters where they could and then shamelessly falsified their credentials.” All were without influence at home and four of the five nations of the Haudenosaunee did not even participate. As the historian of the event noted, “There was an element of masquerade attached to the visit” and “From the start, readings of the visit were contested.”33 Moll’s map heightens the masquerade since he knew full well that there were five Haudenosaunee nations, not four, but since only four “kings” showed up in Britain, it may have been awkward to explain on the map why some opted out.34 The popular essayist and writer Daniel Defoe, whom Moll knew well and counted among his circle of friends and associates, published a view of the visitors that aligned with the geography books whose maps Moll engraved. Defoe wrote that they were from “a small Nation of Savages in the Woods, on the back of our two Colonies of New-England and New York, the same from whence our four pretended Indian Kings came lately on their own Fools Errand; they were always esteem’d as the most Desperate, and the most Cruel of the Natives of North-America.”35 The visit’s diplomatic fig leaf worked, nevertheless: The governors got Crown support for an invasion of Canada but it miscarried, as Moll lamented on his map.

As the editors of this volume contend, maps are material artifacts that express arguments and a range of desires, and so a great deal depends on who commissions or develops a map and who the intended audience is. Moll’s 1715 map differs greatly from Mitchell’s map forty years later that Prior analyzes in part because they were responding to different political and military environments, had different origins, and were making different arguments as a result. Richter has characterized the different periods of the long eighteenth century in North America as ones of violent regional wars (1670s to 1710s), regional equilibrium (1720s to 1750s), and the return of violent regional wars (1760s to 1815), each requiring different interpretations.36 Moll created his map in the first period on the cusp of the second, Mitchell produced his map in the second period and on the cusp of the third, and Moll’s map was a private commercial venture designed to sell as many imprints as possible while Mitchell’s map was commissioned by the president of the Board of Trade “who sought to advance his own aggressive agenda with respect to the empire in North America in the run-up to the Seven Years’ War.”37 Moll’s and Mitchell’s maps expressed different arguments for the literate public that was their audiences and, in Mitchell’s case, a clear government purpose. Unlike Mitchell’s map, Moll’s map was not centered on Iroquoia. Indices that were present in Mitchell’s map were absent in Moll’s and Delisle’s maps: There were no blocks of text positioned around the map that narrated episodes in the diplomatic history of the interior and no explanations of migrations and territorial transactions. Moll’s map presented the idea that the Haudenosaunee were valuable military allies subject to the Crown of Great Britain, while Mitchell contended they were valuable military allies and had a greater degree of sovereignty than Moll allowed. After all, Moll composed his map in light of Clause XV of the Peace and Friendship Treaty between France and Great Britain at Utrecht in 1713 that ended the War of the Spanish Succession, which considered “the five nations or cantons of Indians, subject to the dominion of Great Britain,” and his map reflected that public understanding.

Moll acknowledged the military importance of the Haudenosaunee as allies but not much else. Unlike Mitchell, Moll contained the Haudenosaunee polity within Britain’s colonial borders and, consistent with his general practice, he withheld from the Haudenosaunee the cartographic code, a border, which signaled sovereignty.38 This downplaying of the sovereignty of the Haudenosaunee was as fanciful as the many borders Moll did draw, but the imperial and colonial context of his era was quite different from Mitchell’s and there is no evidence that Moll worked with the Board of Trade to promulgate particular state-sanctioned diplomatic and imperial goals with his map. As a commercial cartographic entrepreneur seeking profit above all else, Moll appealed to the tastes of the literate general public, which, as we have seen, diverged greatly from the preferences of governmental elites regarding Native American allies. Moll was granted the title of Geographer to the King, which was as a royal warrant to supply goods and services to the royal household rather than an office of state, which was Delisle’s position in France. The warrant served as an endorsement of quality that elevated the prestige of the tradesperson who produced the good or service. As a private citizen, craftsman, and small entrepreneur, however, Moll had no privileged access to confidential state documents, deliberations, or directives. His information came from the public domain and his circle of acquaintances, some of whom, like Defoe, had connections to various ministers.39

Moll produced a map centered on European imperial antagonisms that took place on the homelands of Indigenous peoples and highlighted their importance as martial resources in inter-imperial conflict. The map extended New York’s and New Scotland’s borders, which now contained French forts in the area around Lake Champlain and “French Settlements” along the St. Lawrence River. While acknowledging French occupancy, Moll appeared to be pushing the British colonial border to the southern bank of the St. Lawrence. He placed “The Great Fall of Niagara” at the northwestern corner of the state of Maryland and made it the aqueous boundary between French and British claims in that part of the Great Lakes region. He also made it the focus of a beautiful inset against the right margin of the map. The inset was a visual fable about the productivity and bounty of North American nature, especially beavers, a lucrative resource worth claiming and contesting, as attested by the intermittent conflicts between the Haudenosaunee, other Native peoples, and the French that occurred after 1640 and which are sometimes called the Beaver Wars (ca. 1641–1701).40 Canada was a French colony so this inset was an invitation to challenge French borders in the heart of North America. Moll’s dedication of the map to Walter Douglass (1670–1739), whom Queen Anne had appointed as Captain-General of the Leeward Islands in 1711 and whose coat of arms bristled with weaponry suitable to defend and extend territorial borders, reinforced a bellicose attitude toward French claims.

In an inset along the bottom margin of the map Moll indicated a British colonial border along the Appalachian Mountains with New France and Louisiana to the west and a fortified Charleston, which functioned as a border garrison against the Spanish and Yamasee people to the south in a second inset.41 The largest inset, “The Improved Part of Carolina,” presented a patchwork of peoples in the colony and the presence of so-called “settlement Indians” who forged a political and economic accommodation with the rulers of Carolina: a “Santee Indian Fort” near the northern border of the colony, “Wando Indian” and “Indian Fort” northeast of Charleston, and “Indian Settlements” (including “Cayawah” [Kiawah] occupying a large island) along the coast southwest of Charleston. Moll did not engrave any borders around these deterritorialized names but showed them living within the well-defined borders of parishes. Disease and warfare reduced their numbers and many disappeared from colonial records after 1743.42 A fourth inset at the bottom left corner of the map showed a zone of increasing imperial and Indigenous conflict in southeastern North America, a region Claudio Saunt characterized as an imperial borderland and Indigenous homeland where imperial conflicts manifested themselves in proxy wars fought by strong regional powers allied with Britain or France but not controlled by either imperial power. Europeans had little presence until the English established a colony at Charleston in 1670 and the French established outposts in the Biloxi-Mobile area around 1700. In 1715, no Europeans resided in these Indigenous territories; however, about 3,000 English and 8,600 slaves lived in South Carolina and about 300 French colonists and 100 slaves resided on the Gulf Coast.43 France obtained control of Florida in September 1712 and made it part of Louisiana, a fact Moll acknowledged in a notation at the bottom of the inset. However, British colonists and newly coalesced Indigenous polities like the Creek, Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Choctaw contested French possession on the ground.44 While overall the inset emphasized the permeability, volatility, and bellicosity of this imperial borderland, which included Florida and Carolina, to stress the commercial vitality of the region along with its permeable borders, Moll engraved the Carolina Trading Route, which led from Charleston across the land of the Creeks (Muscogee) to the land of the Chickasaw on the Mississippi River.

Moll based this inset on Thomas Nairne’s A Map of South Carolina, which decried French presence and promoted a more vigorous British role in the southeast.45 Interested in expanding the colony of South Carolina farther to the west, Nairne made an overland reconnaissance trip to the Mississippi River from Carolina in 1708 to firm up alliances with the Chickasaw and to fight and enslave Native Americans in Florida and Louisiana for the colony of Carolina. His map claimed all the territory from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River between the 29th and 34th parallels for South Carolina. Moll did not follow Nairne in extending the border of Carolina to the Mississippi in this inset, but he did follow Nairne in highlighting the fact that French territory was populated by scores of Native nations, some of whom, like the Chickasaw, allied with the British against the French. Moll identified Indigenous settlements with small hut-like symbols and noted how many fighting men they had according to Nairne and other sources. Like his comment about the Haudenosaunee as “hearty friends,” this calling out of Indigenous martial power signaled to his audience that the significance of Indigenous people lay in their military ability to aid or thwart British designs on a region where waging war appeared increasingly endemic. The French held a similar view of “our Indians” versus “their Indians” and armed their Indigenous allies to fight the Indigenous allies of the British, who reciprocated. Moll’s map and insets supports Richter’s contention that “Indian alliances were vital to Britain’s conflicts with French and Spanish rivals” since Native American allies would do most of the fighting.46

Richter writes, “The importance of the Cherokees to British Imperial interests was driven home in 1730, when the eccentric Scottish baronet Sir Alexander Cuming . . . recruited six alleged chiefs for a highly publicized London interview with the Board of Trade.”47 Moll memorialized this visit with a note next to the name “Cherecies” that “One of ye Kings of this Nation was in England in 1730.” During that visit a delegation signed a treaty that referred to the Cherokee twice as the children and subjects of the British king who agreed to be his allies and fight against Britain’s enemies.48 Historian Kristofer Ray contends that “Carolinians . . . believed that Cherokees provided both a bulwark and a means of expanding via the Tennessee River” but “Cherokees were not simple pawns in a European imperial chess match”: They “consistently manipulated both French and British officials” while “rejecting Anglo definitions of nationhood” since the Cherokee had a decentralized polity in which no one individual or individuals could bind all the clans in one treaty.49 Indeed, “no Native polity in 1725 would have recognized the blanket assertions of singular nationhood” that British Carolinians imposed on a map drawn by Fanni Mingo: “By adding them British Carolinians overlaid an imagined political world on the one described by Fanni Mingo.” The lines on Mingo’s map, representing trading paths and rivers, focused on mobility rather than exclusive jurisdictional claims, the focus and import of the border lines on Delisle’s and Moll’s maps of an imagined, imperially centered political world.50

Delisle’s Carte de la Louisiane et du cours du Mississippi (1718)

Guillaume Delisle’s 1718 Map of Louisiana and the Course of the Mississippi River (see Figure 3.3) certainly read like a French response to Moll’s 1715 map of British claims in North America. The title fully captured the official French position that Louisiana and the watershed of the Mississippi River were coextensive. This claim dates to La Salle in his 1682 proclamation claiming Louisiana for Louis XIV and rested on the theory that the entire watershed of a river or lake was encompassed by the right of “discovery,” which meant that the furthest extent of the Mississippi and its tributaries became the boundaries of Louisiana. La Salle’s claim fulfilled the imperial vision of Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683), who “perceived the great river as the axis of both offense and defense in North America,” thwarting English moves west and Spanish moves east and securing “a French empire in North America.”51 The French applied the principle consistently: The spine of the Appalachians created two watersheds, one for the French to the west and the British to the east. With the War of the Spanish Succession over, Delisle eliminated “Florida” from his map since he no longer needed to consider the territorial claims of a wartime ally. The French had long been interested in Florida and Delisle absorbed it into Louisiana following the French claim that their exploration of hundreds of miles of the Mississippi River meant that they could claim the land drained by it and all its tributaries, including those in what had been Florida. With this “amphibious” approach, to use a concept coined by Truett in this volume, Delisle’s map showed how terrestrial and aqueous spaces were entangled in French territorial claims. As indicators of persistent conflict with Native peoples and imperial rivals, Delisle had French forts dotting the colonial interior of New France and Louisiana from Lake Champlain to Lake Ontario, down the Mississippi River, and on the Gulf Coast.

For Delisle, the border of British colonies began just south of Charleston and ran north and then northeast along the spine of the Appalachian Mountains, turning east to Fort Susquehannock in Pennsylvania and then north again but remaining south of Lake Champlain. An “old fort of the French” in the southeast, La Salle’s short-lived fort in “Texas” and his 1685–1687 explorations in that region, the 1710 and 1713 journeys by Louis Juchereau de St. Denis (1676–1744) and that by Jean Baptiste le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville in 1717 shown on the map completed these French claims of “discovery.” He also showed the new French settlements of Natchitoches and New Orleans. While contesting Spanish paper claims to a region it never occupied, Delisle acknowledged those claims by engraving the route of Hernando de Soto’s (1497–1542) and Luis de Moscoso Alvarado’s (1505–1551) expedition of 1540–1543, Alonso de León’s (ca. 1639–1691) 1689 route from northern Mexico to confront La Salle’s (abandoned) fort, and the location of Nuestro Padre San Francisco de los Tejas which, in 1716, provided Spain a sustained physical presence for the first time. Delisle placed Louisiana’s western border at the Rio Grande and Pecos rivers and its northern border at the Great Lakes. At the bottom of the map Delisle provided a key to some of the map’s symbols. A hut represented “Indian dwellings” or towns, a star “disturbed Indians,” and a cross “destroyed Indians.” The hut symbols were quite numerous while the others were quite sparse. As he did on his earlier maps, he noted the names of the major Indigenous nations in “Louisiana” including the Iroquois, Miami, Cherokee, Choctaw, Osage, Caddo, and Apache, but he also noted somewhat sensationally that there were “nomadic and cannibalistic Indians” along the Gulf Coast of Texas.52 A notation that Delisle placed in Carolina asserted that the French discovered, took possession, and named the area in honor of Charles IX back in the sixteenth century. Delisle placed the Iroquois outside the boundaries of British colonies and within French-claimed domains between the Great Lakes and the headwaters of the Ohio River. He noted the Indigenous nations “destroyed by the Iroquois” including the Erie, Huron, and others, indicating the extent of Haudenosaunee military forays into the Ohio River Valley and the Ontario Peninsula, but he did not place these areas under Haudenosaunee territorial control or dominion. As in his previous map, he did not draw any borders around Native nations as indications of territorial sovereignty. His map deterritorialized Native peoples and reterritorialized Spanish and British claims to the area in favor of the French.

In 1717 only twenty-seven French families lived in Louisiana but the French were on the move.53 To impede Spanish colonization of the region, St. Denis built a fort on the Red River in 1714, staking a claim to the region.54 In 1718 Bienville founded New Orleans to regulate use of the Mississippi River and to create a more permanent presence and alliances with the powerful Native peoples of the region like the Choctaw and Natchez. Delisle’s placement of the border of Louisiana at the Rio Grande and Pecos rivers in his map was an aggressive move encouraged by officials in Paris.55 Although the French did not have enough settlers or military presence to enforce such a boundary, the Spanish and British took French imperial imaginings seriously.56 Delisle made Louisiana look like a unified territory with specific political boundaries.

The publication of his map with its expansive view of Louisiana’s borders coincided with a publicity campaign that accompanied the launch of John Law’s joint-stock Company of the West and a French economic boom. Delisle produced the map for the company and noted mines containing lead and copper as well as routes indicating possible trade relations in northern Louisiana.57 The company issued shares to investors and promised to develop the new territory. Investors expected fantastic returns based on rumors of Louisiana’s natural resources (gold, other precious metals, pearls) and prospects for economic development.58 British elites were disturbed by the Company of the West, and Delisle’s significant reduction of the western and southern borders of British colonies along the eastern seaboard and appending that territory to French Louisiana only inflamed matters.59 The fact that a few months after he published his map he was awarded the unique title of First Geographer to the King (with an annual salary) made it appear that the French state gave its official blessing to the disposition of French territorial holdings in North America that Delisle had proposed in his map. Delisle’s reputation as a methodical and meticulous geographer added scientific heft to what was clearly a political act.

Kim Gruenwald’s idea of a riverine West neatly encompasses the terraqueous region that the French claimed in the interior of North America, a region drained by the Mississippi River and its tributaries. In French theory and practice, rivers were not so much borders as arteries or fluid conduits of connection; being connective and expansive rather than delimiting and restrictive, they justified French territorial claims, and no map expressed that idea more than Delisle’s map of Louisiana, confirming Gruenwald’s insight that the Atlantic world made “landfall” along rivers leading to the interior of the continent.60 Delisle’s map and Moll’s response to it show that rivalries of the Atlantic world spread to the continental interior.

Moll’s New Map of the North Parts of AMERICA claimed by FRANCE (1720)

Delisle’s territorial claims and border renderings incensed English colonial elites like Richard Beresford (d. 1724), who wrote to the Commissioners for Trade and Plantations in 1717 that “the French had a design to dispossess us of all our plantations” in North America.61 The governor of New York, William Burnet (1688–1729), wrote to the Commissioners for Trade and Plantations in 1720 that Delisle’s new map made even greater encroachments on British territories than his earlier maps and was drafted in the same spirit. Complaining that the French had set up a trading post near Niagara Falls and were working to reduce British influence in the region, he urged the British government “to break the neck of [French] trade.”62 For their part, in August 1719 the Commissioners for Trade and Plantations requested maps from the English colonies since there were few reliable maps of colonial territory that could support British claims to territory and specific borders.63

Attuned to the political and commercial opportunities of the situation, Moll issued a map with a very long title explicitly challenging Delisle’s portrayal of colonial territories and the borders that distinguished them: A New Map of the North Parts of AMERICA claimed by FRANCE under the names of Louisiana, Mississippi, Canada and New France with the Adjoyning Territories of England and Spain (see Figure 3.4). As in his earlier map, Moll was at pains to show in this map that the conflict over borders was a conflict over claims to territory and to the Indigenous military and economic resources needed to defend and exploit them, in particular the trade in beaver and deerskins and enslaved human beings.64 Moll enumerated two areas of conflict in the title cartouche. The first area concerned colonial boundary-drawing and Delisle’s contraction of the western border of British claims in North America, especially Carolina. Moll’s map was not an exact reproduction of Delisle’s 1718 map. Instead, he placed Delisle’s borders on a new base map: “the South West part of Louisiana is done after a French Map Published at Paris in 1718 and we give you here the Divisions or Bounds according to that Map, which Bounds begin 30 Miles S West from Charles Town in Carolina and run on to ye Indian Fort at Susquehannock 30 Miles West of Philadelphia &c.” and, in case his map readers doubted him, noted just to the right of the title cartouche, “N.B. The French Map mention’d in the Title is done by Monsr. Delisle and Publish’d by him at Paris in June 1718, which I am ready to shew to any Gentlemen that desires it.” The second area of conflict concerned Delisle’s placing the Iroquois and Cherokee within the French colonial sphere. Moll insisted to his map readers that the powerful Iroquois and Cherokee people were staunch and reliable military allies of the British, “the Bulwark and Security of all their Plantations in North America.” His sentiment echoed the understanding of the role of Native Americans in maintaining European colonies that English colonists like William Byrd II expressed: “The Indians are very numerous on the branches of this river [the Mississippi], and if the French find means to gain them, it will render the English plantations very unsafe.”65 As graphic reinforcement of the importance of Indigenous allies in shifting imperial borders, Moll placed a view of Fort Susquehannock, which the Haudenosaunee (with English support) sacked in the late seventeenth century, in the upper left-hand corner of his map. While the French thought that the Indigenous fort marked the western colonial border of Pennsylvania and the eastern border of French-claimed territory, Moll’s view emphasized its link with Indigenous peoples rather than its boundary-making quality, perhaps because by 1719 the fort was a ruin and represented the power to shift borders in Britain’s favor.66

Even though Moll placed information from Delisle’s map on his own map, including the names of Indigenous peoples without territorial boundaries, he did not copy Delisle’s notations of the destruction of other Indigenous peoples by the Haudenosaunee, and he could not bring himself to trace Delisle’s boundary line very far because it showed French claims to western Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, and Maine (New Scotland), so he angled it to more closely match British territorial claims. He expanded the boundaries of Maryland and Pennsylvania westward and included the Haudenosaunee within them. He did show Delisle’s diminution of Carolina to stoke British outrage, but he could not resist putting the proposed-but-never-founded British colony of Azilia within French-claimed territory and placing many Cherokee villages within it.

Moll’s map memorialized imperial conflicts that occurred in Native homelands and involved transgressing imagined borders during the War of the Spanish Succession. For instance, Nairne mounted a successful raiding party deep into Florida that he undertook with his Yamasee allies in 1706 to capture Spanish-allied Native Americans and bring them back to Charleston to sell into slavery. Moll showed Nairne’s band transgressing the border with Florida and provided an “Explanation of an Expedition in Florida” in a note just east of the Yucatan Peninsula, which included a numeric key identifying different places on Nairne’s route into and out of the Everglades and a comment that his raiding party captured thirty-five Indians and “took and killed 33 Men.” A note at the top of Palaxy Bay, which Moll copied from Delisle, that the English destroyed Santa Maria de Palaxy, a Spanish-Apalachee mission in 1705, represented a clear act of aggression across colonial borders that was part of a sustained British campaign with Yamasee and Creeks allies to remove Spanish impediments to English expansion southward.67 For his British audience who likely would never see Delisle’s map, Moll replicated the forts on that map and added more to heighten the imperial threat posed by the French. Two insets on the right margin of the map showed sites of great strategic importance during and after the war. Both involved maritime borders and “islands of occupation.” The first displayed the fortified harbor of Annapolis, formerly Port Royal, taken from the French in 1710, which helped secure British territorial claims in Nova Scotia. The second depicted Mobile Bay and the mouth of the Mississippi River, which offered the French access to native trade routes in the interior and blocked British and Spanish advancement in the region.

Below the compass rose Moll engraved an Advertisement that referenced Cabot’s “discovery” of Florida in 1498. The reference served to justify extending the border of Carolina southward to include northern Florida. The dotted line above it was another possible border based on King Charles II’s 1663 authorization for the English to settle and farm Carolina, whose western border he extended to the Pacific Ocean, thereby encompassing large chunks of Louisiana, Texas, and New Mexico. In Moll’s view, it was easy to see the extent of French and Spanish “encroachments” on good British claims to Native American homelands. His map served to reterritorialize French and British claims even as it deterritorialized Native Americans.

Conclusion

Borders on Moll’s and Delisle’s maps were deceptively precise boundary lines meant to establish clear-cut territorial jurisdiction and claims to legal and political sovereignty. However, their maps also showed borders to be unstable because they treated the territorial claims of Native peoples and other European powers as contestable and provisional and as a source of future conflict. In contrast to assertions of political sovereignty represented by borders on these maps, much of North America consisted of interracial, interethnic, interpolitical contact zones where borders were contested and where no single group ruled supreme.

Sometimes map historians claim too much for maps when they contend, like John Pickles (following Denis Wood and Jean Baudrillard) and Matthew Edney, that maps produce the territory: “Maps and mapping precede the territory they ‘represent.’ . . . Territories are produced by the overlaying of inscriptions we call mappings” and regions “are human concepts that are created by being mapped.”68 There is a way, of course, that this philosophically idealist claim is true: Maps have a discursive function and create a graphic image of a territory, an abstraction that is not the territory itself but a visualization of a physical space that allows an idea of the territory to be constructed as part of a larger political or social discourse. As mentioned earlier, political borders on maps encode the idea of territory for map viewers but cartographic codes do not create territory on the ground. That is because maps, as discursive representations and claims to territory, were, are, and can be contested and voided. We have seen claims and counterclaims to territory in the maps by Delisle and Moll, who often did not deploy the same toponyms for the same mapped features. What territory was “produced” simply by the acts of being mapped and claimed? Claiming and mapping land for France did not by itself make that land “French territory,” especially when Native peoples and the British and Spanish contested the claims and toponyms. While maps mediate our understandings of territory and borders, it is a fallacy to conflate them with the territory mapped, much less with producing territory or dominating it. The last fallacy is one Edney identifies.69 After all, the map is not the territory and paper claims on maps did not produce territory.

“Louisiana,” as Delisle outlined it in his 1718 map, was mostly imaginary and while imagining is a first step to acquiring, it is insufficient for possessing or “producing” territory. If borders on maps become authoritative, it is less on the “authority” of a map than a consequence of political and often military action in the physical/material world. Maps are “paper claims” and “paper encroachments” that can stir up passions and indignation, but they mean little without political or military or economic action to enforce those claims and encroachments in the physical world to which many maps, like those that are the focus of this chapter, refer. In the end, it is human labor-power, human activity “on the ground,” that produces territory, not merely human imaginings, even if these imaginings and the map war it produced in the early eighteenth century helped frame different public understandings in France and Britain and called these publics’ attention to specific points of contention regarding French and British colonial claims in North America during an era of intense imperial conflict and outright war.70 While Brian Harley endorsed the idea that the map precedes the territory, he also mentioned an important caveat: Such maps were an “anticipatory geography.” Anticipation may not lead to realization, so his further claim that “maps were the first step in the appropriation of territory” is only true if the appropriation of territory actually happened. It is not even clear that maps were a necessary “first step” for colonial territorial claims since neither Colbert nor La Salle had any idea of the extent of the Mississippi River and certainly no map of its geographic reach before laying claim to all the land it touched. La Salle named it Louisiana before the name ever appeared on a map, so the idea that maps precede the territory must be relativized to specific cases and not declared a general maxim regarding the power of maps to create territory.71

In his 1720 map, Moll confronted the visual and textual rhetoric of Delisle’s 1718 map that asserted the French claim to vast territory based on the discovery of a watershed with a visual and textual rhetoric of his own that asserted the British view that only European settlement justified territorial claims as exemplified by showing major colonial cities like Charleston, Jamestown, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Quebec, and Montreal. Moll’s 1720 map repeated much of the information available on his Beaver Map. He reproduced the borders on Delisle’s map in order to mock them and rile up his compatriots. Where Delisle emphasized the importance of the Mississippi River and its tributaries on his map and deemphasized municipal settlements in the French colonial sphere, Moll deemphasized riverine features and emphasized municipal settlements in the British colonial territories. They both engraved the names of Native American nations across the landscape, but they gave little indication of Native political sovereignty despite the clear indication that they occupied the land near their name. Their maps also made clear that European-style political borders in North America in the early eighteenth century were convenient fictions, asserted and rearranged according to colonial agendas. Despite being fictions, borders asserted claims to territorial jurisdiction and legal and political sovereignty that were often followed up with action, with some polities, like European colonies, “deserving” the cartographic symbol for political sovereignty, a border, while others, like Indigenous polities, did not.

Notes

1. 1.  Michael Biggs, “Putting the State on the Map: Cartography, Territory, and European State Formation,” Comparative Studies in History and Society 41, no. 2 (1999): 374–405; Nancy Shoemaker, A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century North America (Oxford University Press, 2006); Juliana Barr, “Geographies of Power: Mapping Indian Borders in the ‘Borderlands’ of the Early Southwest,” William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 1 (January 2011): 5–46.
2. 2.  Dennis Reinhartz, The Cartographer and the Literati: Herman Moll and His Intellectual Circle (Edwin Mellen Press, 1997), 1; Seymour I. Schwartz and Ralph Ehrenberg, The Mapping of America (Wellfleet Press, 2001), 133; Nelson-Martin Dawson, L’Atelier Delisle: L’Amérique du Nord sur la table à dessin (Éditions Septentrion, 2000), 43–47; Mary Sponberg Pedley, The Commerce of Cartography: Making and Marketing Maps in Eighteenth-Century France and England (University of Chicago Press, 2005), 33; Christine Marie Petto, When France Was King of Cartography: The Patronage and Production of Maps in Early Modern France (Lexington Books, 2007), 41, 59; Christine Marie Petto, Mapping and Charting in Early Modern England and France: Power, Patronage, and Production (Lexington Books, 2015), 45, 54, 71n3.
3. 3.  Rich Heyman, “Locating the Mississippi: Landscape, Nature, and National Territoriality at the Mississippi Headwaters,” American Quarterly 62, no. 2 (June 2010): 303–33 (quote 331).
4. 4.  Michiel Baud and Willem van Schendel, “Toward a Comparative History of Borderlands,” Journal of World History 8, no. 2 (Fall 1997): 211–42, esp. 215. See also Charles Maier, Once Within Borders: Territories of Power, Wealth, and Belonging Since 1500 (Harvard University Press, 2016), 76; Jordan Branch, The Cartographic State: Maps, Territory, and the Origins of Sovereignty (Cambridge University Press, 2014), chapters 4–5.
5. 5.  Baud and van Schendel, “Comparative History,” 211, 216.
6. 6.  See Samuel Truett’s chapter in this volume, “Amphibious Tales: Villagers and Strangers in a Border-Crossing World,” 292; Colin G. Calloway, One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West Before Lewis and Clark (University of Nebraska Press, 2007), who argues on page 2 that Native Americans may have witnessed “zones of interaction” but these “formed, overlapped, and re-formed around” Indigenous homelands where they had the upper hand in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; Claudio Saunt, “‘Our Indians’: European Empires and the History of the Native American South,” in The Atlantic in Global History, 1500–2000, ed. Jorge Cañizares-Esquerra and Erik R. Seeman (Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007), 61–75; Barr, “Geographies of Power,” 8–9, 14, 19, 21, 29, 38, 43; Robbie Ethridge, “Creating the Shatter Zone: The Indian Slave Traders and the Collapse of the Southeastern Chiefdoms,” in Light on the Path: The Anthropology and History of the Southeastern Indians, ed. Thomas J. Pluckhahn and Robbie Ethridge (University of Alabama Press, 2006), 207–18; Robbie Ethridge, “Introduction,” in Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South, ed. Robbie Ethridge and Sheri M. Shuck-Hall (University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 1–62.
7. 7.  For border-making by Native peoples and the erasure of those borders on European maps see Barr, “Geographies of Power,” 6–7, 8–11, 16–17, 21–22, 26–27, 29–30, 37–38, 43–46. On the power of Native peoples, see Chad Anderson, “Rediscovering Native North America: Settlements, Maps, and Empires in the Eastern Woodlands,” Early American Studies 14, no. 3 (2016): 478–505. On the reliance of Europeans on Indigenous geographic knowledge and mapping skills as well as Indigenous expression of territorial sovereignty see Jeffers Lennox, Homelands and Empires: Indigenous Spaces, Imperial Fictions, and Competition for Territory in Northeastern North America, 1690–1763 (University of Toronto Press, 2017), chapters 1 and 2.
8. 8.  See Rachel St. John, “Imperial Spaces in Pekka Hämäläinen’s ‘The Comanche Empire’,” History and Theory 52, no. 1 (February 2013): 75–80, where she discusses the porous nature of imperial boundaries and the nodal, rather than broad territorial, nature of imperial control: “The presumption of territorial authority that [was] represented in official documents and maps often far exceeded the reality of imperial power on the ground” (78). Most control was nodal and over specific places, enclaves, and corridors, not over broad swaths of contiguous land.
9. 9.  David J. Weber, “New Spain and Its Borderlands,” in Major Problems in the History of North American Borderlands, ed. Pekka Hämäläinen and Benjamin H. Johnson (Wadsworth, 2011), 179; Barr, “Geographies of Power,” 44; Pekka Hämäläinen, “The Shapes of Power: Indians, Europeans, and North American Worlds from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century,” in Contested Spaces of Early America, ed. Juliana Barr and Edward Countryman (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); Gilles Havard, The Great Peace of Montreal of 1701: French-Native Diplomacy in the Seventeenth Century, trans. Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott (McGill-Queens’s University Press, 2001). Reversing a Eurocentric field of vision, Calloway contends that Native Americans were not “people in between” European empires but that Europeans were “people on the edge” of Native territories. Calloway, Winter Count, 313. With their tidy border markings, Moll’s and Delisle’s maps openly maintained that European empires claimed all of the North American continent that was known to Europeans but, upon closer viewing, those maps also demonstrated the marginal place of those “empires” whose “core” areas lay on the edges of the continent.
10. 10.  The logical fallacy involves confusing a conceptual model of territory with the territory itself, a confusion of epistemology with ontology. On maps and the illusion of territorial control, see Matthew Edney, Cartography: The Ideal and Its History (University of Chicago Press, 2019), 76–77.
11. 11.  J. Brian Harley, “Rereading the Maps of the Columbian Encounter,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82, no. 3 (September 1992): 522–36 (quote 531).
12. 12.  In Delisle’s case it would be reports from the journeys of René-Robert Cavelier, sieur de la Salle (1643–1687), Pierre Le Moyne, sieur d’Iberville (1661–1706), and Pierre-Charles Le Sueur (ca. 1657–1704); and in Moll’s case it would be reports from the journeys of William Dampier (ca. 1651–1715), William Funnell (fl. 1700–1707), Woodes Rogers (ca. 1679–1732), and Thomas Nairne (fl. 1695–1715). See Petto, King, 102–3; Petto, Mapping, 127–29, Reinhartz, Cartographer, 77–83, 118–22, 130.
13. 13.  While the term does not appear in the body of her article, I borrow the concept “map war” from the title of Mary Pedley, “Map Wars: The Role of Maps in the Nova Scotia/Acadia Boundary Disputes of 1750,” Imago Mundi, 50 (1998): 96–104, to characterize the acrimony of the cartographic conflict between Moll and Delisle and to link it to the territorial and military disputes of the period. For a brief discussion of mutual “paper encroachments” and the tension between Moll and Delisle with a focus on the period after 1718, see Petto, King, 105–6; Petto, Mapping, 125–33.
14. 14.  Guillaume Delisle, Carte du Mexique et de la Floride, des Terres Angloises et des Isles Antilles, du Cours et des Environs de la Riviere de Mississipi. Dressée sur un grand nombre de memoires principalemt. sur ceux de Mre. D’Iberville et le Sueur. Par Guillaume Del’Isle, Geographe de l’Academie Royale des Sciences. A Paris, chez l’Auteur sur le Quai de l’Horloge, (avec) Privilege du Roy po. 20. ans, 1703. Call # G1015 .L5 [1731] FF, https://purl.stanford.edu/fr132rs4988 (accessed July 4, 2021).
15. 15.  While there is no thorough, English-language book-length study of the war in its entirety, or of its North American theater, there have been some specialized studies including John Hely Owen, War at Sea Under Queen Anne, 1702–1708 (Cambridge University Press, 2010); Renger E. de Bruin et al., eds., Performances of Peace: Utrecht 1713 (Brill, 2015); Wooter Troost, “Leopold I, Louis XIV, William III and the Origins of the War of the Spanish Succession,” History 103, no. 4 (357) (October 2018): 545–70; as well as those that place the war in a larger context like Bruce P. Lenman, “Colonial Wars and Imperial Instability, 1688–1793,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume II: The Eighteenth Century, ed. P. J. Marshall (Oxford University Press, 1998), 151–68.
16. 16.  Phillippe R. Girard, “Europe and the World,” in A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Europe, ed. Peter H. Wilson (Blackwell, 2008), 402–17 (quote 410).
17. 17.  Sara Stidstone Gronim, “Geography and Persuasion: Maps in British Colonial New York,” William and Mary Quarterly 58, no. 2 (2001): 373–402, esp. 382. See also V. Y. Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa (Indiana University Press, 1994), 33–36; Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 51–68. For a discussion and critique of the European discourse and application of terra nullius, in which non-European peoples had no legal title to the land they occupied, see Alex Zukas, “Terra Incognita/Terra Nullius: Modern Imperialism, Maps, and Deception,” in Lived Topographies and Their Mediational Forces, ed. Gary Backhaus and John Murungi (Lexington Books, 2005), 49–76, where I conclude (67), “Until its eventual collapse . . . the norm of terra nullius justified the immoral and illegitimate exercises of imperial power which the maps of the period helped validate, mediate, and memorialize.”
18. 18.  A translation of the official minutes of the ceremony is in E. B. O’Callaghan, ed., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York (Weed, Parsons and Co, 1855), 9:803–4.
19. 19.  Schwartz and Ehrenberg, Mapping, 133; Samuel Truett, “Settler Colonialism and the Borderlands of Early America,” William and Mary Quarterly 76, no. 3 (July 2019): 435–42.
20. 20.  Tamar Herzog, Frontiers of Possession: Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas (Harvard University Press, 2015), 1.
21. 21.  Truett, “Settler Colonialism,” 437–38.
22. 22.  On French dependence on Native peoples, see W. J. Eccles, The Canadian Frontier, 1534–1760, rev. ed. (University of New Mexico Press, 1983), 1–156; Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1–140. On the issue that “partial control—irregular borders, layered loyalties, fragmented spaces—may well be a prevalent imperial condition” in the early modern world, see Pekka Hämäläinen, “What’s in a Concept? The Kinetic Empire of the Comanches,” History and Theory 52, no. 1 (February 2013): 81–90 (quote 86).
23. 23.  Patricia Galloway, “Debriefing Explorers: Amerindian Information in the Delisles’ Mapping of the Southeast,” in Cartographic Encounters: Perspectives on Native American Mapmaking and Map Use, ed. G. Malcolm Lewis (University of Chicago Press, 1998), 223–40. Delisle was a tutor to the dauphin and became a member of the state-sponsored Académie Royale des Sciences in 1702. Pedley, Commerce, 38–39; Petto, King, 41, 153, 158, 181.
24. 24.  David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (Yale University Press, 1992), 148. On the productivity of the silver mines of northern Mexico and their importance to the global economy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see John Tutino, Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North America (Duke University Press, 2011), 1–208, and John Tutino, The Mexican Heartland: How Communities Shaped Capitalism, a Nation, and World History, 1500–2000 (Princeton University Press, 2018), 1–101. Tutino’s account helps explain the desire of the French and British to possess these mines.
25. 25.  Weber, “New Spain,” 180–81; Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (Yale University Press, 2009).
26. 26.  Patricia Seed, “Taking Possession and Reading Texts: Establishing the Authority of Overseas Empires,” William and Mary Quarterly 49, no. 2 (1992): 194. See also Patricia Seed, American Pentimento: The Invention of Indians and the Pursuit of Riches (University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 32–34, and Zukas, “Terra Incognita,” 54.
27. 27.  Schwartz and Ehrenberg, Mapping, 133; Samuel Truett, “Settler Colonialism,” 435–42.
28. 28.  Cecil Headlam, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and West Indies, Volume 28, August 1714–December 1715 (H. M. Stationery Office, 1928), 116, 11 March 1715, #271.
29. 29.  David H. Landis, “The Location of Susquehannock Fort,” Journal of the Lancaster County Historical Society 14, no. 3 (1910): 2–3, 19–20.
30. 30.  A System of Geography, or a New & Accurate Description of the Earth In all its Empires, Kingdoms and States. Part the Second, Containing the Description of Asia, Africa, and America. Written in Latin by Joan. Luyts Professor in Acad. Ultraj [Utrecht]. English’d with large additional Accounts of the East-Indies, and the English Plantations in America. Illustrated with Maps, Fairly Engraven on Copper, according to the latest Discoveries and Corrections, by Herman Moll. (Printed for Tim. Childe, at the White-Hart in St. Paul’s Churchyard, 1701), 159.
31. 31.  Thesaurus Geographicus, or The Compleat Geographer. Part the Second. Being the Chorography, Topography, and History of Asia, Africa, and America. Faithfully extracted from the Best Modern Travellers, and most esteem’d Historians: and Illustrated with Maps, Fairly Engraven on Copper, according to the modern Discoveries and Corrections by Herman Moll, Third Edition very much Enlarg’d, v. 2 (A and J. Churchill, and T. Childe, 1709), 235.
32. 32.  Eric Hinderaker, “The ‘Four Indian Kings’ and the Imaginative Construction of the First British Empire,” William and Mary Quarterly, 53, no. 3 (July 1996): 487–526 (quotes, 488).
33. 33.  Hinderaker, “Four Indian Kings,” 490–491, 496.
34. 34.  On the map of The English Empire in America that he engraved for System, 161, Moll wrote “The 5 Nations of the Iroquois” along the southern edge of the eastern Great Lakes so he, and likely his readers, knew how many “cantons” there were, but the “mistake” does raise the question of the legitimacy and public perception of the visit.
35. 35.  Defoe’s diatribe appeared on March 15, 1712, at the beginning of A Review of the State of the British Nation (volume 8, number 153), a periodical he published. The quote appears in Hinderaker, “Four Indian Kings,” 524. On Moll’s relationship with Defoe, see Reinhartz, The Cartographer and the Literati, vii–ix, xii–xiii, 3, 6–8, 25–26, 81–87, 113–126, 140–146, 151.
36. 36.  Daniel K. Richter, “Native Peoples of North America and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume II: The Eighteenth Century, ed. P. J. Marshall (Oxford University Press. 1998), 347.
37. 37.  Matthew H. Edney, “John Mitchell’s Map of North America (1755): A Study in the Use and Publication of Official Maps in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Imago Mundi 60, pt. 1 (2008), 63–85, esp. 70–78 (quote, 63).
38. 38.  On their maps of Asia and Africa Moll and Delisle engraved borders for empires and kingdoms like China, the Mughal Empire, Congo, and Angola, which Europeans recognized as sovereign states; however, for people from whom Europeans withheld such recognition, he engraved their names across a borderless landscape. It might be objected that Moll and Delisle did not draw boundaries around Haudenosaunee or other Indigenous lands because they did not know their actual extent, but lack of such knowledge did not prevent them from proposing borders for China, Congo, and Angola.
39. 39.  Pedley, Commerce, 33, 39; Petto, King, 41, 59, 158; Petto, Mapping, 132–133.
40. 40.  William K. Boyd, ed., William Byrd’s Histories of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina (Dover, 1967), 292, 294. See also Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 50–66, 74, 98–99, 144–149, 161–164, 189, 256; Matthew D. Zarzeczny, “Beaver Wars,” in Shaping North America, edited by James E. Seelye Jr., Shawn Selby, and Christine Eisel, vol. 1 (ABC-CLIO, 2018), 97–100.
41. 41.  Schwartz and Ehrenberg, Mapping, 135; William P. Cumming, British Maps of Colonial America (University of Chicago Press, 1974), 6. Moll based this inset on a map by Edward Crisp that appeared in his 1711 A Compleat Description of the Province of Carolina in 3 Parts.
42. 42.  Ethridge, “Introduction,” 34, 37 and Eric E. Bowne, “‘Caryinge awaye their Corne and Children’: The Effects of the Westo Slave Raids on the Indians of the Lower South,” in Ethridge, Shatter Zone, 107–8. On Indigenous population decline, see Peter H. Wood, “The Changing Population of the Colonial South: An Overview by Race and Region, 1685–1790,” in Powhatan’s Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast, revised and expanded edition, ed. Gregory Waselkov, Peter H. Wood, and Tom Hatley (University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 72–74.
43. 43.  Saunt, “‘Our Indians,’” 61–62.
44. 44.  See Ethridge, “Introduction,” especially 2, 13–19. For population estimates, see Wood, “Changing Population,” 60–61, 72, 84–85, 95–97, 105–106.
45. 45.  Alexander Moore, “Thomas Nairne’s 1708 Western Expedition: An Episode in the Anglo-French Competition for Empire,” Proceedings of the Meeting of the French Colonial History Society 10 (1985): 47–58.
46. 46.  Richter, “Native Peoples,” 349. On the French use of their Native allies to attack the Native allies of the British and the resulting regional destabilization and devastation of Indigenous societies, see Saunt, “‘Our Indians.’”
47. 47.  Richter, “Native Peoples,” 359.
48. 48.  Headlam, Calendar of State Papers, Volume 28, 116, 11 March 1715, #271.
49. 49.  On diplomatic theater involved in the negotiations and final treaty and Cherokee expectations, see Gregory D. Smithers, “‘Our Hands and Hearts Are Joined Together’: Friendship, Colonialism, and the Cherokee People in Early America,” Journal of Social History 50, no. 4 (Summer 2017): 609–29. That members of the Board of Trade believed, perhaps erroneously, that the Cherokee had acknowledged subjection to the British king, see Verner W. Crane, The Southern Frontier, 1670–1732 (Duke University Press, 1928), 299–302. Kristofer Ray, “Cherokees and Franco-British Confrontation in the Tennessee Corridor, 1730–1760,” Native South 7 (2014), 33–67, considers Crane’s work “an older but still useful interpretation” (59). Quotes are on page 36.
50. 50.  Kristofer Ray, “Interpreting Native Trans-Appalachia, 1670–1770: Or, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Read Fanni Mingo’s Map,” Revue de la Société d’études anglo-américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles [Online], 78 (2021), paragraphs 3 and 4, accessed December 1, 2024, http://journals.openedition.org/1718/8090. Ray remarks in endnote 3 that the Cherokee “maintained similar religious and cultural beliefs across their five settlement regions. Spiritual, material, and cultural connections, however, are not the same as political and diplomatic, even if contemporary Europeans showed a maddening willingness to conflate them.”
51. 51.  Richard Gross and Craig P. Howard, “Colbert, La Salle, and the Search for Empire,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 113, 2 (Summer 2020): 68–101 (quotes, 73, 83, 88). See also, Heyman, “Locating the Mississippi.”
52. 52.  Cannibalism is not one of the attributes Juliana Barr ascribes to the nomadic peoples of the Texas Gulf Coast whom she discusses in “Geographies of Power,” 14–16, 19.
53. 53.  Schwartz and Ehrenberg, Mapping, 139.
54. 54.  J. R. Edmondson, Alamo Story: From Early History to Current Conflicts (Taylor Trade Publishing, 2000), 10. Delisle incorrectly attributed the founding to Bienville in 1717.
55. 55.  Petto, Mapping, 128–130.
56. 56.  Petto, Mapping, 130.
57. 57.  Petto, King, 103. William Cumming, The Southeast in Early Maps, 3rd ed., rev. and enlarged by Louis de Vorsey Jr. (University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 212.
58. 58.  Antoin E. Murphy, John Law: Economic Theorist and Policy-Maker (Oxford University Press, 1997); Malcolm Balen, The Secret History of the South Sea Bubble (Fourth Estate, 2003), 45–67; Richard Dale, The First Crash: Lessons from the South Sea Bubble (Princeton University Press, 2004), 56–72; Kenneth J. Banks, Chasing Empire Across the Sea—Communications and the State in the French Atlantic, 1713–1763 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008).
59. 59.  Balen, Secret History, 50–52, 58–61, 64–65.
60. 60.  Kim M. Gruenwald’s chapter in this volume, “When a River Is a Border: Rivalries and Commercial Networks in the Riverine West,” 144.
61. 61.  Headlam, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Volume 30, August 1717–December 1718 (H. M. Stationery Office, 1930), 119–20, 7 December 1717, #238.
62. 62.  Headlam, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Volume 32, March 1720–December 1721 (H. M. Stationery Office, 1933), 202–7, 26 November 1720, #303.
63. 63.  Headlam, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Volume 31, January 1719–February 1720 (London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1933), 187–88, 26 August 1719, #354.
64. 64.  See for example, Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717 (Yale University Press, 2002); Kathryn E. Holland Braund, Deerskins and Duffels: The Creek Indian Trade with Anglo-America, 1685–1815, 2nd ed. (University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 1–70.
65. 65.  As quoted in Margaret Beck Pritchard and Henry G. Taliaferro, Degrees of Latitude: Mapping Colonial America (The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and Harry N. Abrams, 2002), 123.
66. 66.  Moll copied the view from Arnoldus Montanus’s 1671 Description of New Netherland. Landis, “Susquehannock Fort,” 2–3, 19–21.
67. 67.  John E. Worth, “Razing Florida: The Indian Slave Trade and the Devastation of Spanish Florida, 1659–1715,” in Ethridge, “Shatter Zone,” 299–306; John E. Worth, “English Conquest of Georgia,” The New World, September 18, 2011, https://thenewworld.us/english-conquest-of-georgia/ (accessed March 21, 2021).
68. 68.  John Pickles, A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping and the Geo-Coded World (Routledge, 2004), 5; Edney, Cartography, 55, and J. Brian Harley, “Rereading the Maps of the Columbian Encounter,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82, no. 3 (September 1992): 522–36, esp. 531. The postmodern/poststructural theorist of simulacra and the hyperreal, Jean Baudrillard, writes, “The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—it is the map that engenders the territory.” Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Glaser (University of Michigan Press, 1995), 1. (Original French version published in 1981.)
69. 69.  See David Turnbull, Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers: Comparative Studies in the Sociology of Scientific and Indigenous Knowledge (Routledge, 2000), 98, on this point. Edney makes a related point that confuses ontology with epistemology when he asserts that it is unacceptable (for mapmakers, map users, or anyone) to assume that a region exists before it is mapped. Edney, Cartography, 50–51, 55, 57, 76–77.
70. 70.  See, for example, the discussion in Hämäläinen, “What’s in a Concept,” of the idea of a “kinetic” empire that the Comanches created by movement and activity (raiding, trade fairs, political assemblies, control of shifting economic nodes) over a large geographic area that had as its aim territorial integration rather than uncompromised territorial control. See also St. John, “Imperial Spaces,” 78–80. On the dynamic, dialectical, and mutually constituting relationship between the material (tangible) and immaterial (intangible) in the creation of borders and territories see Olga Demetriou and Rozita Dimova, eds., The Political Materialities of Borders: New Theoretical Directions (Manchester University Press, 2019) and Stuart Elden, “Terrain, Politics, History,” Dialogues in Human Geography (August 2020): 1–20, https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820620951353, where he argues that territory is continually “made and remade by human agency and physical processes” (7). On the “performative” rather than the purely “representational” understanding of territory, Turnbull contends that written descriptions of territory lasted well into the eighteenth century. See Turnbull, Masons, 12–13, 126, 133–64.
71. 71.  Harley, “Rereading,” 531–32. In fact, mapmakers like French royal geographer Nicolas Sanson (1600–1667) in the 1650s and 1660s gave the toponym “Florida” to the area between the Ohio River and the Gulf of Mexico, clearly a case where an “anticipatory geography” of Spanish claims fell flat.