Jak Peake (University of Essex)
Geography and empire have long been perceived as correlative, the former often justifying the aims of the latter. The intrinsic value of geography was demonstrated in Trinidad in 1797 after the island was taken from the Spanish by the British and mapped. Scientific knowledge, exploitation and geography were deeply enmeshed in the military strategy which characterised much of the Britain’s early rule of the colony. Under the authority of Thomas Picton, Trinidad’s first British Governor, allegiance to the British Crown was imperative and sedition a dangerous offence liable to torture, imprisonment or deportation. Fear of the Spanish and French creoles on the island, who posed a threat to British hegemony, was to be weighed against the potential for British influence on the Spanish Main. Thus the British authorities walked a fine line between policing the colony and encouraging insurrection on the South American mainland, courting revolutionaries such as Francisco de Miranda. Significantly, language became the coloniser’s tool for espionage, reconnaissance and geographical knowledge on the island. Officially discouraged by the British administration, Spanish remained the unofficial language of the colony, often practised by the colony’s military and administrative leaders. Examining various literary works, geographical surveys and historical accounts alongside V.S. Naipaul’s The Loss of El Dorado and A Way in the World, this paper analyses the competing literary narratives of Trinidad’s imperial and geographical imagining in the early period of its British possession.
