A pretty good book. You learn how to correctly spell Sir Walter RALEGH (not Raleigh) and you learn much more than you ever dreamed about British Guiana, now Guyana. Burnett is a bit full of himself and he throws too many first person references into his work, but he tells an intriguing story. He ties El Dorado, the Victoria regia, traverse surveys, borders, explorers, and the like together to discuss what Guiana IS. He peppers the book with some Harleyesque postmodernish theories about exploring means "possessing" the land and such.

In Masters of All They Surveyed, D. Graham Burnett explores the colonial investigations and delimitations of the boundaries of British Guiana. Burnett’s primary character is the explorer Sir Robert Schomburgk, who mapped parts of Guiana over multiple expeditions in the 1830s and 1840s. Burnett uses Schomburgk’s traverse surveying treks through the wilderness of South America to illustrate the transitory nature and cultural makeup of boundaries and the imaginary frontiers of mapmakers. This echoes an epigram of the Roman Seneca’s that Denis Cosgrove draws attention to: “How ridiculous are the boundaries of mortals.”

Burnett’s wide-ranging work touches on many fields of knowledge and walks through many centuries of history. To buttress his historical and cartographic arguments, he brings in science and even literary criticism to put Schomburgk’s works into context. Burnett begins with the explorations of Sir Walter Ralegh and his attempt to discover the fabled land (or city, or kingdom, or empire) of El Dorado. Burnett pins much of British Guiana’s development and history on El Dorado, as various attempts to prove its location lead to the founding, exploration, and boundary-making of the colony. Schomburgk considered himself a sort of Humboldtian successor to Ralegh and Burnett thinks it is important to understand Schomburgk’s movements in the interior through this light. Burnett’s second and third chapters discuss Schomburgk’s expeditions and the various attempts by himself and others to prove the location of El Dorado. In the introduction he states that, “Myths overwrote terra incognita with significance.” And Burnett makes it clear that Schomburgk was trying to bolster the claims and reputation of Ralegh while at the same time superseding and, in a sense, “out-Raleghing Ralegh.” Burnett claims that: “Schomburgk had the privilege of tracing Ralegh’s route across his own map,” and further states that “Ralegh legitimizes Schomburgk; Schomburgk exculpates and restores Ralegh. Schomburgk walks Ralegh’s path, but Ralegh walks on Schomburgk’s map.” As Cosgrove emphasizes in Apollo’s Eye, maps can tell historians much about their author and the author’s society, and must be understood in to better interpret the map’s meaning.

Besides Schomburgk’s desire to emulate and better Ralegh, he was a scientific man of his time and attempted to bring science to the art of border making. Like his “mentor” Alexander von Humboldt, Schomburgk used the same sort of traverse survey method in which accurate and multiple measurements were made between fixed geographic landmarks. By choosing visible landmarks, and thus imbuing them with significance, the manmade concept of a border can be placed in its “natural” context, that is, a boundary can be made into a “natural boundary.” Only by using this Humboldtian method of traverse surveying “could the map be reconciled with the ground; only then could the map become a testable proposition.” One of the hallmarks of the scientific method is its testability and repeatability, and by fixing maps and borders to physical localities attempts to lend cartography these scientific attributes. Schomburgk, true to the times, even went into an area that was known to be under Venezuelan sovereignty in order to link his traverse surveys to Humboldt’s. This would tie his maps of British Guiana to Humboldt’s maps, and because Humboldt was held in high esteem among scientific circles of the day, make Schomburgk’s map all the more reliable and scientific.

Schomburgk’s work on delineating the borders of British Guiana illustrates the absurdity of finding “natural boundaries.” As Schomburgk moved across and around the colony, he chose natural objects that suited his traverse surveying method such as rivers and mountains. Burnett notes, however, that selecting natural objects in no way makes the border a natural one, as Schomburgk has multiple motives for moving his objects, and thus his border, as he sees fit. Burnett gives a striking example:
Over the four years the boundary had moved from the right bank of the Rupununi, to that river’s western watershed (a line between the Rupununi and the Takutu), and then again right up to the right bank of the Tukutu itself. All were abundantly natural; none was a natural boundary.

Burnett is drawing attention to the fact that precise boundaries are strictly an invention of Europeans beginning in the Enlightenment. The phrase, “All were abundantly natural; none was a natural boundary,” illustrates that natural boundaries are as imagined as those lines that separate political entities. Even the most “secure” of natural boundaries, coastlines, are illusory when translated onto a map as Paul Carter so ably demonstrates in his essay “Dark with Excess of Bright.”

The deceptively shifting and figmental borders of British Guiana are a central theme of Burnett’s work; he shows them to be every bit as mythical as Ralegh’s El Dorado. The concluding chapter of Masters of All They Surveyed discusses how the border disputes of British Guiana’s history were settled (albeit temporarily) not by new expeditions, but through the manipulation of cartographic history. Schomburgk’s imaginary lines were used (see the map below), new expeditions were not mounted. Burnett even notes that the boundary disputes linger today, and are part of modern Guyana’s culture. Burnett’s work, lively and informative, serves to illustrate just how ridiculous the boundaries of mortals are. Borders and boundaries are transitory and imagined objects, and are not tied to the physical reality of the earth. Maps that pictorially depict these boundaries are one more step removed from reality – they represent a representation, an imaginary portrayal of an imaginary line. The Penguin Dictionary of Geography ambiguously and cryptically defines a boundary as, “a line of demarcation, real or understood, visible or invisible, natural or artificial, of legal or of no legal significance, which may be perceived from either side (or both sides) of it….” Schomburgk’s romps through the South American jungles, mountains, and savannahs were important to creating the myth of a British Guyana discretely separate from the nations surrounding it. ( )