Nearly all of us spend part of our day mapping Maine. Some of us use paper maps or online maps or even high-tech satellite maps, but most often we use our own personal mental maps to navigate and explore our everyday environments. Without even thinking about it, we can trace complicated routes to work or to school.

When necessary, we can find new places by relying on our mental mapping abilities to identify landmarks and orient ourselves in new surroundings. In conversations, we try to place people and events by finding out where someone is from or where something occurred, a mental mapping task that helps us make sense of our social world.

For a long time, geographers have recognized that maps do more than depict locations on the Earth’s surface. Just like our own mental maps, all maps reflect the perspectives and preoccupations of their makers. Maps also have the power to shape the meanings of places. They promote certain ideas about a place and downplay other aspects of that same place. In short, maps have hidden agendas that influence how we understand and value the places they depict.

Maps have played a critical role in the settlement and development of Maine. They have been important for navigating coastal waters and cruising timberland, or in resolving – and sometimes fueling – border disputes with Canada, as well as in proving the land claims of large or small landowners. One of the single most important maps in Maine’s past was John Smith’s 1616 map that charted the coast from Cape Cod north to Penobscot Bay. It was the first map to refer to the region as New England.

Smith certainly wasn’t the first European to map Maine’s coastline. He was preceded by explorers sailing from France, Spain and England such as Estevan Gomez, Samuel de Champlain, Bartholomew Gosnold, Martin Pring and George Weymouth. Still, Smith’s map may be the most important to Maine’s eventual settlement.

In England, Smith’s map went through at least nine updates and editions. Together with the book “A Description of New England” that accompanied the map, it inspired the Pilgrims and Puritans to establish colonies in Massachusetts. Paul Royster, editor of an online version of the map and description hosted by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, refers to the documents as “an extended advertisement and prospectus for investors and settlers.”

By the time he visited the Maine coast, John Smith was an experienced explorer and colonist. He had traveled throughout Europe, the Caribbean and North Africa, but is probably most widely known for his role as a leader of the Jamestown settlement in Virginia, including his capture by the chief Powhatan and his eventual release, apparently at the urging of Powhatan’s daughter Pocahontas.

The most obvious thing about the 1616 map is the large portrait of John Smith himself, encircled by his title, “Admiral of New England,” a bold attempt at self-promotion. A closer look at the map shows how surprisingly settled Maine and Massachusetts appear to be. English place names are scattered along the coastline well before there were any permanent European settlements in the region, the vast majority of which were used at the insistence of Prince Charles of Scotland, later King Charles I, who was 15 years old at the time.

A few of the names on Smith’s map have stuck. Cape Anna on the map is now known as Cape Ann and the map has Plimouth at present-day Plymouth, Mass. Some of the other English place names sound familiar but appear out of place. For instance, present-day York is called Boston, and what Smith calls Harington Bay we call Casco Bay.

Many of the place names on Smith’s map are simply foreign to us. What we know today as the Kennebec River is called River Forth; the location of the Sagadahoc colony is called Leth; and Monhegan is called Barty Isle. This foreign naming shows a pattern of replacing the pre-existing (Anglicized) Wabanaki names with English that borrows heavily from English and Scottish place names.

Seeing a map so densely populated with English place names might make one mistakenly think this New England already is densely populated with Englishpeople. To heighten that impression Smith shows drawings of meetinghouses, implying actual English settlements, next to names such as Ipswich (near present-day Biddeford) or Aborden (near present-day Penobscot). So, if replacing the Wabanaki names with English ones is a way of erasing the Indian presence and claiming the land for English colonization, the pictures of meetinghouses go one step further and depict settlements that haven’t happened yet.

In the book “A Description of New England” that accompanied the map, Smith describes the thriving agriculture and local people he found living along the New England coast: “[W]e saw … gardens and corn fields, and so well inhabited with goodly, strong and well proportioned people … who can but approve this a most excellent place both for health and fertility?” And, then, in the very next sentence, he declares that the region is uninhabited: “[O]f all the four parts of the world that I have yet seen not inhabited … I would rather live here than any where.”

This strange contradiction – “a not inhabited land so well inhabited” – seems to reveal that, even before he created the 1616 map of New England, on Smith’s personal mental map he had erased the presence of the Indians who were right before his eyes.

Smith’s map was an essential early step in English colonists’ efforts to seize land that later became Maine, showing how powerfully maps have shaped our world. But thinking about Smith’s naming and his contradictory description of our region also might make us wonder who or what gets left out of our own mental maps and what we miss out on because of those omissions.