How to Find a Windward Passage; or, Mapping Eighteenth-Century Ireland’s Colonial Legacies

This brief essay explores the colonial nature of Ireland’s mapping traditions to suggest where these may have been translated by Irishmen to other islands, other colonies, other empires. It has also attempted to show how the space between islands, for imperial trade, and the transfer of mapping, irrigation, and plantation expertise, became a very significant space of empire. From the late seventeenth century onwards, the Caribbean’s shifting sands of imperial and religious identity became the ideal transnational space for international Irish families. A small case study of the Caribbean’s Windward Passage, with its substantial Irish presence and landing points in Les Cayes and Holland Bay, invokes the microhistories that could inform further explorations of Irish colonial legacies in the future.