ABSTRACT
The more the mathematician ‘reduces’ the particularity of their subject, the smaller the contribution of their individual discretion, and the greater their confidence and authority appears to grow. Far from trying to reduce and transcend the particularities of their context in the interests of mathematical authority, surveyors operating in America were often keen to emphasize precisely the tricky particularities of their work. William Hubbard’s geography reminds his English and American readership that they are all ‘doubtful travellers’ in a wilderness which God’s providence is only gradually illuminating. It also reminds them that the thin lines of imperial geometry are often impotent in desert places, and that the metropolitan empire needs its diligent and canny lanthorn-bearers. Hubbard’s cartographic geometry, suggest Matthew Edney and Susan Cimburek, is part of a conventional ‘self-effacing rhetoric’ which allows him to enter public discourse, speaking a truth which can be verified by an international constituency of educated peers.
