 |
Maps, Americans, and the Opening of Tokugawa Japan
|
Alice Baumgartner
ABSTRACT
Sixteen months after the whaling ship Manhattan set sail from Sag Harbor on November 9, 1843, Captain Mercator Cooper stood on the forecastle with a scope raised to his eye. Before him loomed a ship, wrecked on "a reef or rocks not laid down on the charts," from which his crew had rescued eleven Japanese sailors. Among the articles taken from the sinking junk was a map of Japan: "one of the most interesting specimens of geographical art and literature which has ever wandered from the shores of eastern Asia." Often considered to be an instrument of colonial expansion, maps sought to order faraway lands for the purpose of imperial control. Each explorer casts an "imperial eye" on the foreign coasts because he understood that every natural feature seen from the portholes of his ship could be "ordered and classified and, by extension, systematically named, controlled, and possessed." The world could be created on paper. Even if imperial possessions did not exist in reality, they could nonetheless be created on the map. As Foucault observed, the "quest for truth was not an objective and neutral activity, but was intimately related to the 'will to power' of the truth seeker." Cartography was, therefore, a prerequisite to imperial control.
Download this article (PDF)
<< Back to Contents, Volume 2, Spring 2009
