Tracing Presence: Experience, Indigenous Agency, and Place in European Toponymy of New Guinea, 1606–1908

This article excavates signs of the empirical impact of Indigenous agency and place in European charts and maps of New Guinea over three centuries. In the process, it incidentally summarizes the island's cartographic history. Voyagers' primary toponymic praxis bestowed honorific eponyms and descriptive or associative names on places seen. However, read critically with other materials generated on the spot, charts and maps also disclose traces of Indigenous presence. The brevity of encounters and lack of lingua francas ensured that few Indigenous placenames were recorded before the 19th century. The generic early form of Indigenous presence in maps of New Guinea and wider Oceania is imposed placenames memorializing the demeanour of a situated population, read here as toponymic residues of obscure but sometimes decisive local agency. A related theme exemplifies the influence of prevailing knowledge or technology and unpredictable geography or weather on New Guinea's mapping during the age of sail.