Imagining the West Indies: A Seventeenth-Century English Map of Montserrat

Abstract

Among the most distinctive maps of the seventeenth-century Caribbean is an unsigned 1670s manuscript map of English Montserrat. Unusual for its presentation of a series of seven perspectival views of the coastline, “Mountserrat Island 1673” captures a highly localized understanding of the island as a sequence of fragmented roadsteads with an unmapped and uncontrolled interior. Contrasting the Montserrat map with more conventional views of other British Caribbean islands reveals the divergent ways that colonists and metropolitan residents understood these colonies and the consequences for the construction of the British empire.