Slide Sets

A 1972 photo-essay book entitled The Gulf of Mexico opens with a wonderful two-page map dotted with the names of cities, bays, islands, and channels from the Yucatan to Cuba, and from the Mississippi Delta to the Laguna de Terminos. Although the author intended to circle the Gulf himself “to see how its beauties were standing up to the ravages of progress,” he narrowed his journey to areas “along the United States coast” (Keating, 12). If we examine the topographical details of the Gulf map, we find no outlines or names for Mexican states, and few indications of Mexico’s major rivers flowing into the Gulf. Like the author, the map-maker treated coastal areas differently depending whether they were located north or south of the Rio Grande.

Why do even the best-intentioned narrations and mappings of the Gulf separate out the “U.S.” and “Mexican” spaces? Why not represent the Gulf of Mexico as an international area connected by trade and shared history, like the “Great Lakes Region,” the “Baltic” or the “Mediterranean”? Like author Keating, geographers name their own nation’s coast—the “Southern Gulf Coast” in the United States or “La Costa del Golfo” in Mexico—but seldom adopt a regional perspective on the Gulf of Mexico and surrounding lands. Even though we may visualize a “Pacific Rim” shared by California, Chile, and Japan, we rarely acknowledge that the ports of Tampa, Mobile, New Orleans, Galveston, Matamoros, Tampico, Veracruz, Campeche, and Havana face each other across the same Gulf waters. Instead, we adopt the vantage point of a northerner looking south, and tend to cut the great Gulf region into sections rather than leaving it whole:

With roughly 600,000 square miles of surface, the Gulf of Mexico ranks fifth among the world’s seas, surpassed only by the South China, Caribbean, Mediterranean, and Bering seas. Though the Gulf is only slightly more than half the size of the neighboring Caribbean, it is nevertheless half again as large as the combined five bordering states of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. Not counting bays and inlets, the coastline runs about 3,000 miles, half of it in the United States, the other half in Mexico. (Keating, 11)

Even when environmentalists approach the entire gulf as a shared ecological zone—the “Intra-Americas Sea”—they find that previous investigators have not collected comparable data, because research focused on ecosystems defined by “national” boundaries rather than “natural” ones (Maul 1993; Salvador 1991; Britton 1989). On political maps from both sides of the border, the Gulf remains a problematic boundary, much like the 2,000-mile “border” or the 90-miles of sea between Miami and Havana. Maps produced in the U.S.A., Mexico, or Cuba, are designed to highlight their own coastlines, rivers, and ports, leaving neighboring lands and waters pale and unnamed. A search for “Gulf of Mexico” or “Golfo de México” in library catalogs reveals that most publications emanate from governmental sources in the form of scientific, legal, or economic studies dealing with geology, marine biology, or shipping. Much research focuses on the Gulf of Mexico in terms of territorial rights to fishing or off-shore oil reserves.

Recently, archeologists and ethnohistorians have begun to look beyond national borders to explore the pre-Columbian relationships between Native Americans of the “Southeastern United States” and “Ancient Mexico.” The spatial history of this vast region deserves equal attention. By exploring representations of the Gulf of Mexico in colonial cartography, this slide set takes a first step toward reconnecting the disparate pieces and fragmentary vision that we have inherited. Further steps will require closer analysis of early cartography, and attention to maps of the Mexican Independence period (since 1820), and the post-annexation period (since 1846-1848).

European cartography during the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries turned its artistic, nautical, and scientific gaze toward the Americas. The images of the Gulf produced during these two periods of rapid change, transculturation, and conflict differ strikingly from one another, yet they all emerge from active exploration and technical innovation. Selecting six maps to illustrate how the Gulf of Mexico has been mapped from the world’s archival collections is bound to be an arbitrary exercise. The criteria for selecting this map set was both practical and aesthetic: each manuscript map belongs to the Newberry Library’s Edward E. Ayer Collection, the map-makers were born into varied historical settings, labeled their maps in different languages, and often served expanding empires or emerging nation-states that competed for territories in the Americas. Each map was drawn and colored by hand, and represents a technical and/or artistic cartographic style of its period.

Until 1506, the year of his death, Columbus believed that the new-found lands were part of Asia...Moreover, the shape of the east coast of North America and of the Gulf had to be conjectural, for the Gulf was not mapped before 1519, and much obscurity surrounds the various supposed voyages up the east coast before 1510. (Quinn, 1990: 51)

Since Edmundo O’Gorman suggested in 1958 that “America” had been “invented” rather than “discovered” by Europeans (1961: 9-47), interdisciplinary attention has turned to maps. If humanists usually consult written texts, while geographers refer to maps, this boundary no longer holds. Today, cartography is at the center of literary, anthropological, and historical approaches to “Las Américas” (Zerubavel 1992; Rabasa 1993; Mignolo 1995; Dussel 1995; Rice 1995). Questions about how “meanings” are produced in map-making, or how cartography is implicated in the production of power and knowledge, have entered the geographer’s sphere (Harley and Woodward 1987; Harley 1988, 1989). From these recent perspectives, the Gulf of Mexico can be understood as an “object of knowledge.” Our everyday image of the Gulf, like academic research on this American sea, is influenced by the mapping of its waters and shores during the age of European “discovery” or “invention” displayed in sixteenth century maps.

Chartmaker Baptista Agnese (1527-1564) was best known for the beauty and technical precision of his maps, which are often considered among the century’s fine works of art. The Americas and the Gulf of Mexico are depicted on several of his maps and charts in the Ayer Collection. The worn condition of this particular atlas with faint marginal notes indicates that it was not merely decorative, but used by mariners. Portolan charts, originally developed for navigation in the Mediterranean in the later Middle Ages, display the Gulf as a singular body of water partially enclosed by the island of Cuba, and the peninsulas of Florida and the Yucatan. Later maps suggested that these peninsulas might be islands, so the earlier portolan charts are more accurate in this respect.

Due to the small size of Agnese’s maps at the Newberry, the names of many rivers, bays, capes, and towns or provinces have been omitted. On this chart, coastal features north of Veracruz are named, but southern ones are not; other charts in the collection name the coastal rivers and provinces south of Veracruz. The size of the lake surrounding Tenochtitlan (today, Mexico City) is extremely exaggerated on this chart, and Agnese labels the city “Temitslan.” Indigenous namings were retained only where the Spaniards had encountered people whose allegiance they valued or whose power they respected. The small island where the fortress of San Juan de Ulúa would later be built was named for the day of San Juan, and after the Nahuatl term for the entire land (“Colua”) (Wagner 1942: 38-39). Agnese’s maps name “Topanco” and “Panuco” to the north of Veracruz (Aztec garrisons), and “Tavasco,” “Iucatan,” and the river “Quazalcalco” (today, Coatzalcalcos) to the south (independent provinces). All other features were renamed by Grijalva or later explorers: a notable example being the “Rio de Espiritu Santo,” later reverting to the Native American term “Mississippi” on French maps. While Grijalva retained the indigenous name “Papaloapan” for a Tabascan river, Cortes later called it the “Alvarado,” which today names the port but not the river. During the nineteenth century, maps returned to the native names for rivers again, as in naturalist Baron von Humboldt’s records and national maps produced in Mexico.

An interesting case of Spanish naming, heeded by most European cartographers at least through the seventeenth century and in some cases into the eighteenth, was the river “Almeria” north of Veracruz. The river Nautla and the entire coastal plain were re-designated “Almeria” in reference to a Spanish province that faces east towards the Mediterranean. This naming is one of the clearest hints that sixteenth-century navigators conceived of Mexico’s warm Gulf as a sea comparable to the Mediterranean.

This unique Turkish map of the Western Hemisphere is not only oriented toward the south, with “South America” on top, but it also exaggerates the Gulf of Mexico, and features imaginary Turkish ships sailing toward the Gulf. A beautiful map, presumably drawn from accounts and confiscated maps of Portuguese captives, it also distorts the northern coastline that runs directly east from Florida to Labrador, and overemphasizes the curve of South America’s western coast. This map illustrated a handwritten manuscript that relied on classical geographies from Greek, Biblical, and Koranic sources, and perhaps for this reason, we see the Amazon River rising from southern mountains and flowing northward, paralleling the contemporary understandings about the source of the Nile (Goodrich 1990).

Sebastião Lopes’s ornate and well-crafted sixteenth-century atlas includes preliminary leaves with religious scenes, descriptions of solar movement, rules for movable feasts of the Roman Church, and calendric and astronomical tables. Chart 17 in the atlas illustrates the coast of New Spain along the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean. Chart 18 (shown here) encompasses the Isthmus of Panama, a part of Central America and the western coast of South America to the 34th parallel. Lake Nicaragua is shown as connected to a waterway that joins the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific by straits or rivers.

First navigated by Juan de Grijalva, then charted by Alonzo Alvarez de Pineda in 1519, and (less accurately) by Hernan Cortes, the Gulf of Mexico, along with the Caribbean, was depicted on Spanish, Italian and Portuguese maps as a major sea connecting the land masses of the Americas. Portolan atlases revealed or “invented” the New World for Europe. To claim possession of the coast and adjacent territories, handwritten Spanish namings are set at right angles to the Gulf shoreline on these maps. Toponymies invented by Grijalva, Cortes, de Soto, and others were retained on the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Portuguese and Dutch maps, but many have disappeared today.

Nurtured in theory, the Enlightenment proceeded forthwith to practice, leading naturally to a new age of discovery that extended to the New World...[F]or whatever reason, ‘the whole climate of European thought’ seeped into Spain and thence crossed the Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico and beyond. (Weddle, 1995: 3)

The beautiful compass roses of portolan charts gave way to a more scientific and measured approach to maritime cartography in the late seventeenth to the eighteenth century. French surveys of their own coasts, and topographical mappings in Europe, challenged cartographers to produce increasingly accurate and detailed charts. Technical innovations including triangulation, map projection, marine chronometers, the metric scale, and isobath lines to indicate water depth, all came to fruition by the mid-1700s (Thrower 1996: 91-124). Cartography gained both scientific and political force when maps were consulted to settle claims among the great European powers (Jackson 1996-97; Buisseret 1990: 67-68). Reliance on maps to claim huge territories in the Americas meant that accurate measurement became a priority, and not surprisingly, the conflictive eighteenth century became “the golden age of cartography.” Improvements in French and English map-making soon pushed Spain to support combined military, political, and surveying expeditions. These complicated processes are aptly displayed on three eighteenth-century maps of the Gulf of Mexico in the Newberry Library’s Ayer Collection.

A pastel-tinted French map of the Gulf (“Golfe du Mexique”) on paper by Philippe Buache carefully marks significant trade routes and islands. The son of a map-maker, Buache was one of the key cartographers who followed upon Guillaume Delisle’s work on Gulf mapping. The Delisle maps, in turn, had been inspired by power struggles between the French and Spaniards in the late seventeenth century, and disputes over the location of the mouth of the Mississippi and other key landmarks (Buisseret 1987: 16). Developing the contour method for marking marine depths, Philippe Buache charted shallow waters and shoals accurately. Based on astronomical observations made at Santo Domingo, he calculated longitude and latitude to improve the placement of the Gulf on navigational and world maps, although errors in longitude placement persisted (Weddle 1991: 326-347). As Jack Jackson points out, the “mapping work intensified as the French gained access to what had earlier been recognized—by Spain, anyway—as Spanish territory” (Jackson 1996-97: 6-7), and the scientific lead held by France in mapmaking was rapidly emulated by other nations.

This map on vellum attributed to Bernardo de la Orta shows 31 trade routes in red. Two longitudinal measurements are provided: one from the meridian of Cadiz, and the other from Tenerife. While de la Orta’s map resulted from an expedition ordered by Galvéz and Evia, it is partially based on an earlier map by Joseph Smith Speer. War between Spain and England in 1779 sent Bernardo de Galvéz (memorialized by “Galveston Bay”) into military action along the northern Gulf. After becoming governor of the Louisiana-Florida region, he immediately launched a survey mission to acquire more accurate chartings of the northern coastal areas where he had fought. Jose Antonio de Evia headed the expedition, and experienced pilot who had sailed Gulf waters and lost 153 men on a hidden shoal near Campeche. Lacking longitudinal measurements, and the details of small inlets, his maps and others inspired by them (such as the de la Orta map) provided crucial information to navigators. Later, these maps proved useful in boundary disputes over Texas and Louisiana territories (Weddle 1995: 168-199).

This practical yet attractive map drawn by Thomas Southwell, an Englishman sympathetic to the Spanish cause, suggests setting up tax-free salt collection and fisheries along the coastal zones marked in green to populate the area and protect nearby coasts from other European powers. Color outlining indicates areas claimed by European nations or won in recent fighting by French (+), English (o), or Spanish (*) forces (e.g., it indicates that West Florida was recently gained by the Spanish although marked in yellow-green code for England).

In his report to the Spanish government, Southwell explained that the map showed excellent waters off the coast of Yucatan and Campeche where a fishing industry could be promoted to strengthen claims and prevent smuggling. He particularly condemned English ships which illegally dealt in gold, silver, cochineal, deerskins and fruit for trade up and down the Veracruz coast; ostensibly shipping logwood (palo de tinte), Southwell accused the foreign ships of depriving the royal treasury of tax revenues and exploiting the Indians.

While sixteenth- through seventeenth-century maps of the Gulf of Mexico represented this “American Sea” as a whole, European conflicts in the Gulf of Mexico gradually brought about a segmentation of images by the eighteenth century. This change is most strikingly highlighted by Thomas Southwell’s map that color-codes territories claimed by competing colonial powers–or won in military battles. Once the post-1848 boundaries dividing the U.S.-Texan and Mexican coasts were defined, the pastel colors on national political maps divided the coastal zones into “ours” and “theirs” on both sides of the border.

With proclamations by Columbus, Grijalva, Pineda and Cortes, the native names for rivers, bays, towns, or provinces were supposedly erased; however, local peoples remembered the ancient names, which often reappeared after several centuries. The great province of “Almeria,” where thousands of Spanish cattle grazed in the 16th century, has long disappeared from the Veracruz landscape between the Nautla and Zempoala rivers—its Spanish name forgotten. However, Nahua and Totonac languages are still heard where Aztec garrisons and Totonac city-states stood in 1520. Long after the “Rio del Espiritu Santo” became the “Mississippi” again, the site of Cahokia near the Illinois-Missouri stateline was recognized by archaeologists as a major pre-Columbian trade and population center that may have linked peoples of the Midwestern plains with those living along the Gulf of Mexico.

Centuries of dividing the Gulf into contested territories, and later into politically sovereign places, meant that we learned not to focus on its overall shape, coastal and marine features, cross-currents, and relationships of ports and rivers to each other—that is, we ignored its configuration as a natural “whole.” What became important were strategic segments of the Gulf that could be claimed as colonial territories, mapped for the most efficient and profitable trade routes, or utilized for their natural resources. Research on the effects of climactic change in the “Intra-Americas Sea” published by the United Nations Environmental Programme (Maul 1993), and a new interdisciplinary graduate emphasis on the Golfo de México at the Universidad Veracruzana in Xalapa, may be first steps to closer international cooperation in protecting the Gulf’s biological and human diversity. The impressive maps archived in the Newberry Library and other cartographic collections may help us re-conceptualize the Gulf of Mexico—to replace our fragmented image with a vision of green continents linked by blue waters on a round earth depicted by a sixteenth-century Turkish map-maker.

1. Baptista Agnese, chart of North America and northern South America, from a portolan atlas of ten charts and five maps (ca. 1560). Ayer ms map 12
2. [Map of the New World according to another], circular map from Arikh el-Hind el-gharbij [Description of the Indies of the West], a Turkish manuscript dating from the Hegira year 977 [A.D. 1569-1571], attributed to Mutafa ibn ‘Abdullah, called Katib Chelebi or Haji Khalifa. Ayer ms map 18
3. Sebastião Lopes, detail of chart of Central America, the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean Sea and northern South America, from a portolan atlas of 24 charts (ca. 1565). Ayer ms map 24
4. Detail of Philippe Buache, Carte reduit des côtes du Golfe du Mexique et des isles de l’Amerique, ou est marquee la route des galleons (1726). Ayer ms map 181
5. Detail of Bernardo de la Orta, Quarteron del Seno Mexicano (1782). Ayer ms map 241
6. Thomas Southwell, Copia del mapa de las Indias Occidentales y del manifiesto que presentó D. Thomas Southuel...en el año 1769 (1783). Ayer ms map 223

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