During the summers of 1792-94, George Vancouver and the crew of the British naval ships Discovery and Chatham mapped the northwest coast of North America from Baja California to Alaska. Taking the art and technique of distant voyaging to a new level, Vancouver eliminated the possibility of a northwest passage and his remarkably precise surveys completed the outline of the Pacific. But to map an area is to appropriate it – to begin to bring it under control – and Vancouver’s charts of the northwest coast were part of a process of economic exploitation and cultural disruption. The chapters in this illuminating book are written from a variety of perspectives and provide new insights on many aspects of Vancouver’s voyages, from the technology employed to the complex political and power relationships among European explorers and the Native leadership.

Robin Fisher is a Canadian historian and academic. He is the author of Contact and Conflict, a book tracing Indigenous and settler relationships. Originally from New Zealand, he now lives in Canada, where he is a scholar studying the history of BC—in particular, Indigenous-European relations.

Robin Fisher's profile page

Hugh Johnston is a professor emeritus in history at Simon Fraser University, where he has taught for thirty-seven years. For eleven of those years, he was department chair. Johnston was educated at the University of Toronto, the University of Western Ontario and King's College at the University of London. From 1992 to 2001, he served on the board of the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute, which promotes collaboration between India and Canada through scholarly activities and cultural exchange, and in 1995-96, he was resident director of the India officer of the institute. Johnston's previous books include British Emigration Policy 1815-1830; Shovelling Out Paupers, The Voyage of the Komagata Maru: The Sikh Challenge to Canada's Colour Bar and The Four Quarters of the Night: The Life Story of an Emigrant Sikh.

Hugh Johnston's profile page

We are indebted to the editors and UBC Press for publishing these excellent papers from the Vancouver conference for the conference brought together superlative scholars on Vancouver which attracted conference participants from all over the world. It must have been difficult to choose the papers that make up this volume.

B.C. Historical News

A successful edited collection is more than the sum of its chapters; as well as a set of fine separate discussions of disparate topics, From Maps to Metaphors is a model of contemporary scholarship, with its foregrounded, self-conscious awareness of the location of scholars and their sources in time and place, as well as in personal and cultural experiences.

Margaret Anderson, University of Northern British Columbia Book Corner

This is a solid work, and none of its chapters should be dismissed. The authors of From Maps to Metaphors succeed in their attempts to illustrate multiple perspectives regarding the onset of the colonial presence in the Pacific.

Annals of the Association of American Geographers