A new map of the English plantations in America.

I. N. Phelps Stokes Collection of American Historical Prints.

In the late sixteenth century, French, English and Dutch merchant and privateer ships began attacking Spanish and Portuguese in West Indies coastal areas. They had bases in the places the Spanish could not conquer, such as the Lesser Antilles, the northern coast of South America, the mouth of the Orinoco, and the Atlantic Coast of Central America. They managed to establish their foot on St Kitts in 1624 and Barbados in 1626. When the Sugar Revolution took off, they brought in thousands of African slaves to work the fields and mills. English, Dutch, French and Spanish colonists, and in many cases their slaves from Africa first entered and then occupied the coast of The Guianas. The Dutch, allied with the Caribs of the Orinoco carried the fight against Spanish in all South America. The English of Jamaica established alliances with the Miskito Kingdom of modern-day Nicaragua and Honduras, and began logging on the coast of modern-day Belize. These interconnected commercial and diplomatic relations made up the Western Caribbean Zone which was in place in the early eighteenth century. West Indies gave names to several West India companies of the 17th and 18th centuries, including the Danish West India Company, the Dutch West India Company, the French West India Company, and the Swedish West India Company.

In the 17th century, maps took a huge leap forward. Mathematical and astronomical knowledge necessary to make accurate measurements had evolved. English mathematicians had perfected triangulation: navigation and surveying by right-angled triangles. Triangulation allowed navigators to set accurate courses and produced accurate land surveys. Seamen learned to correct their compasses for declination and had determined the existence of annual compass variation. Latitude determination was greatly improved with the John Davis quadrant. The measurement of distance sailed at sea was improved by another English invention, the common log. Longitudinal distance between Europe and Québec was determined by solar and lunar eclipses by the Jesuit Bressani in the 1640s and by Jean Deshayes in 1686. With accurate surveys in Europe, the grid of the modern map began to take shape.