In this landmark volume, Mirela Altic provides the first-ever, in-depth overview of the cartographic work of the Society of Jesus in colonial Spanish, French, and Portuguese America, from the arrival of the order in the New World until shortly after its eighteenth-century suppression. The argument rests atop an impressive body of archival research. Altic has visited over fifty different archives in Europe and the Americas, and has examined just about every Jesuit map they contain, both print and manuscript. She has also considered many maps that do not bear the stamp of the Jesuit order, but that clearly draw upon prior Jesuit accomplishments. This has allowed her to present Jesuit cartography as a crucial missing link in the history of European efforts to map the New World. Focusing primarily on the parts of the American interior where they carried out their missionary work, the Society of Jesus mapped parts of the New World that appeared only as blank spaces in the cartography of the sixteenth century, which was devoted to outlining America's coastlines, and provided a sound basis for the state-sponsored and commercial cartography of the eighteenth century. Jesuit cartography, therefore, was not some curious sideshow: it was a crucial component of the larger European project of apprehending the New World in scientific terms.
Altic develops the argument across four chapters. The first provides an overview of Jesuit cartography, discussing such varied topics as the scientific training of members of the order, the techniques they used to collect data and construct maps, the iconography of Jesuit maps, the channels by which the maps were disseminated, and their general impact upon European understanding of the New World. The three subsequent chapters trace the development of Jesuit cartography in the possessions of the Spanish, Portuguese, and French crowns, respectively, although the lion's share of attention goes to Spanish America. Each chapter develops geographically and chronologically, covering the cartography of different regions as it developed over time, in the hands of individual Jesuits, as well as various collaborators from outside the order. Altic emphasizes the role played by indigenous informants, and thereby underscores the role played by Jesuit mapping in the recording and transmission of indigenous geographical knowledge, yet she also gives due attention to the role of European collaborators of all kinds, including editors, publishers, and mapmakers from outside the order. This allows her to develop one of the book's major themes, the complex relationship that Jesuit cartography enjoyed with the military and colonial projects of the state. One of the things that distinguishes Jesuit mapping in Spanish America from the order's cartography in Brazil or New France is its relative independence. Although Jesuit cartography was deeply entangled with Spain's colonial project, it also stood out as a distinct corpus of maps designed to serve the multiple purposes of the Society of Jesus in a way that it did not in the two other areas, where Jesuit mapmaking was so close to state cartography as to be almost indistinguishable from it.
Altic's book drinks deeply from the methodological wells of the history of cartography as it has been traditionally practiced. It showers much more attention on the maps themselves than on their social, cultural, and ideological settings, and conspicuously attends to questions of accuracy and comprehensiveness. It emphasizes production and producers over reception and users. It is nevertheless informed by many of the developments that have marked the field since the crucial interventions of J. Brian Harley. Altic is well aware that cartographic representation is shaped by the priorities of the mapmaker and the map's intended uses. She therefore attends to the telling presence or absence of details unrelated to the missionary endeavor, but of keen interest to others, like the location of mines. She also appreciates the significance of so-called “decorative” elements like illustrations and cartouches, and understands how their addition by an editor or printer can significantly inflect a map's rhetoric.
Where this book really stands out is in the emphasis it places on the Jesuit mapmakers themselves, and specifically on their unique skills and training. Early modern mapmaking was marked by an abysmal gap between its pretension to accuracy and its incredibly limited capacity to produce accurate maps. Persistent technical challenges plagued the endeavor, most notably the period's inability to measure longitude in real time. Yet even more debilitating was the lack of skilled individuals who could carry out surveys and convert field data into technically sophisticated cartographic representations. The history of Spain's efforts to map the New World, for example, provides numerous examples of ambitious cartographic projects that failed to achieve their end due largely to the severe lack of personnel in relation to the enormity of the task at hand. Into this world stepped the members of the Society of Jesus, who received training in mathematics and cosmography as part of their formation, and were then dispatched as missionaries to the edges of terra cognita. Their training allowed them to do things that few other individuals on the rough and tumble frontier knew how to do, such as make reasonably accurate measurements, collect spatial information in a systematic way, and combine their fieldwork with information drawn from the prior work of other Europeans and from interactions with the indigenous population to produce maps that were reasonably accurate by the standards of the day. The Society of Jesus thus provided the early modern world with the effective cartographic field agents that the state could not itself produce, at least not in the numbers that were needed.
Thanks to Altic's detailed, cartographer-by-cartographer approach to her topic, the Jesuits emerge from the pages of Encounters in the New World, not as an anonymous mass, but as a collection of individual mapmakers responding to unique sets of opportunities and challenges in a variety of different settings. We meet figures like Eusebio Kino, the German Jesuit involved in the mapping of Mexico, whose detailed journals provide key insights into the techniques used by Jesuit mapmakers, or Alonso de Ovalle, whose spectacular map of Chile exerted a powerful influence on European perceptions of southern South America. We learn about Jesuits in Brazil like Alois Conrad Ludwig Pfeil or Jacques Coclés, whose maps helped define the borders of the Portuguese empire in America. We read about anonymous Jesuit cartographers whose maps are invaluable for understanding the human geography of indigenous New France at the time of contact. And so forth. Each instance becomes a window into the larger world of Jesuit cartography, illustrating a different aspect of its driving motives, its inner workings, and its broader significance, as the particular materials allow. The approach does not always make this a book that one can read cover to cover, but it is undoubtedly a treasure trove of case studies, that together constitute a coherent mosaic of the larger topic. It will certainly be of interest to anyone who wants to understand the mapping of the New World by the major Catholic colonial powers, and the scientific activities of the Jesuit order.
