By including these details, Solis participated in a larger cartographic tradition that sought to define not only land but people. The presence of mission symbols, perhaps small crosses or church icons, would have demonstrated the spread of Christianity. Fort symbols and roads indicated the reach of colonial military and trade networks. In this sense, Solis’s map visualized the process of cultural transformation underway in the eighteenth-century borderlands.
Maps as Instruments of Knowledge and Control
The Solis map illustrates a fundamental truth of early modern cartography: maps were not neutral representations of the world but instruments of control. They were used to survey resources, to govern distant populations, and to justify territorial ambitions.
In colonial settings, the map functioned as a bridge between the metropolitan center and the frontier. A governor in Havana or a bureaucrat in Madrid could, through maps like Solis’s, imagine the geography of lands they had never seen. The map turned distant spaces into manageable abstractions, reducing the unpredictable wilderness to lines, names, and coordinates.
For Solis, the act of drawing was an act of order—a way of imposing coherence upon vast and varied territories. His work thus exemplifies the dual legacy of cartography: as both a scientific discipline and a tool of empire shutdown123