Chapter 3 reads two maritime fictions against the cartographic and photographic records of US War Department’s Bureau of Insular Affairs. I argue that the camera’s unpredictable mode of development heightened colonial anxieties about the assimilation of the Philippines into the United States. For a literary counterpoint to the Bureau’s colonizing project, I read back and forth between the island-hopping narratives of Ernest Hemingway and Ramon Muzones, a Hiligaynon language novelist from the Visayas. Their shipboard fictions set adrift the repressive and racializing logics of US military technics. But the novelists move in different directions. Disillusioned, the late Hemingway gets lost at sea, uninterested in a return to national homeland. Muzones complies a pre-Hispanic nautical map, a regional Visayan space within the newly independent Philippine republic.