Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado (review)
Histories of British empire in the Americas tend to emphasize British activities in North America and the Caribbean. D. Graham Burnett reminds us that Britain's imperial project began with the sixteenth-century exploration of what is now Guyana by Sir Walter Ralegh, whose quest for El Dorado produced not only dreams of wealth and glory but an early map of Guyana's interior. As Burnett shows, later authorities would both appropriate and amend this map as part of the process of staking nineteenth-century territorial claims. In a book that draws from methods of literary analysis, imperial history, and the histories of science and cartography, Burnett uses the case study of a human agent (surveyor Robert H. Schomburgk) active in a mid-nineteenth century colonial territory (British Guyana) to further two distinct scholarly projects. First, Burnett analyzes traverse survey techniques for insight into cartographic and navigational science. Second, he looks at how imperial governments used science to justify territorial claims. Burnett's work, which draws heavily on Schomburgk's diaries, reports and maps, introduces the explorer as a key agent of empire as well as important to histories of discovery and science.