Searching for Cofitachequi: How English Colonizers Mapped the Native Southeast before 1700

Abstract

When English colonizers arrived in Carolina in 1670, they drew on Spanish geographic and ethnographic knowledge of the North American Southeast to understand the people and places of the continental interior. This body of texts and maps traced entradas by De Soto and Prado and described a landscape of wealthy, warlike, and powerful chiefdoms. Renaissance and early modern European mapmakers developed an iconography of Native cities that made these social presumptions visible. Such images prepared English Carolinians to engage in diplomacy with Native chiefdoms, particularly Cofitachequi, to counter the threat posed by Spanish Florida. This essay examines two maps commissioned by Carolina’s Lords Proprietors that charted changing views of Native culture, society, and government. After making initial contact with Cofitachequi, English colonists and officials learned to face a new Native world after the collapse of Mississippian society, one dominated by coalescent societies.

Keywords

• Cofitachequi
• chiefdoms
• South Carolina
• Native Americans
• Hernando De Soto
• cartography