https://archive.org/details/atlasofunitedsta00roge
(1857) The cartographer and printer producing a fine, delicately tinted map. This close-up showing the border of BC and Washington. The border had not been fixed – Captain Richards’ navy survey party were just starting work alongside US Commissioners – but Mr. Rogers seems to have taken the US view.
It is a fascinating map – suggesting that the American side was already being surveyed, leaving British North America a vast expanse, unremarked-able from seemingly as-yet-not surveyed.
It brings to mind all sorts of questions about surveying and what survey means. And the pretensions that surveying can bring – the worldviews of surveyor and surveyee. Just what are we measuring, and why?
A fact not lost to First Nations in Eastern Canada – who shortly after contact carefully started disguising routes and pathways through what appeared to be impenetrable wilderness. The prudent among Anglo-Europeans dared not test this cultural boundary. They were the interlopers. They, the usurpers. They, the little children who could die, alone and lost among the ancient forests.
Does a land exist until it has been surveyed?
How will the ideology of surveying inform our species’ expansion to the cosmos?
And other species’ expansion likewise?
Will we be the ones getting colonized?
Have we already been surveyed?
Atlas of the United States of North America, Canada, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Mexico, Central America, Cuba, and Jamaica : on a uniform scale from the most recent state documents, marine surveys, and unpublished materials with plans of the principal cities and sea-ports, and an introductory essay on the physical geography, products, and resources of North America, by Rogers, Henry D. (Henry Darwin), 1808-1866; Johnston, Alexander Keith, 1804-1871; Murray, John, 1808-1892. Publication date 1857
Collection – normanbleventhalmapcenter; bostonpubliclibrary; americana
Digitizing sponsor – Boston Public Library
Contributor – Boston Public Library
Language – English