Paper short abstract:

Drawing on the accounts of early modern explorers, naturalists, and cartographers, this paper examines European and Native American coastal mythologies, revealing that as geographic knowledge changed so too did human networks across the Atlantic world.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the environmental history and cultural geography of the North Atlantic shore during the Age of Exploration. How, it asks, did early modern coastal imaginaries shape the contours of cultural contact and exchange among Native Americans and Europeans? And how did those imaginaries shape the ways both groups interacted with coastal spaces in more material ways? Imagined geographies such as the Northwest Passage, Norumbega, Hy Brasil, the Isle of Demons, and Antillia, as well as numerous Native American land and waterscape mythologies provide deep insight into the ways humans understood the natural world. But as geographic knowledge changed, so too did the human understanding of and interaction with coastal and oceanic nature.

A closer look at these imaginary landscapes and their tendency to migrate across European maps, moreover, serves to blur the boundaries between contemporary imperial spheres of influence, thereby adding fresh perspective to the "spatial turn" in early American history. Ultimately, this careful consideration of the Atlantic littoral adds to the burgeoning field of "thalassography," which acknowledges the existence of many seas nested within the Atlantic world. Drawing on the accounts of early modern explorers, naturalists, and cartographers, this interdisciplinary look at how culture, ecology, geography, and mythology became firmly entangled alongshore reveals that the material and conceptual complexities inherent in coastal spaces played a powerful role in creating new human networks and identities.