586. The cartographer Enrique d’Almonte, at the crossroads of Spanish colonialism in Asia and Africa

Abstract

D’Almonte was a civilian cartographer who made the best maps of the Spanish colonies of the moment (except for Cuba), a task usually carried out by the military. The reasons are his skills as a draftsman, his qualities as an explorer, the rudimentary but efficient methods of measurement he used and the broad linguistic, geological, botanical and ethnographic knowledge he was able to cumulate. His expeditions and maps of the Philippines between 1880 and 1898 surprised the American Bureau of Mineralogy so much that it called him “one of the great explorers of the twentieth century”. Their actions and proposals would result of much utility for the colonial domination that Spanish authorities were seeking to establish.