Every-day Science: Volume 7. The Conquest of Time and Space

by Henry Smith Williams; Edward Huntington Williams

SOUNDINGS AND CHARTS

Though the navigator, thanks to his compass, sextant, and Nautical Almanac, may determine with a high degree of precision his exact location, yet even the best observations do not enable him to approach a coast without safeguarding his ship by the use of another piece of mechanism calculated to test the depth of the waters in which he finds himself at any given moment. In its most primitive form—in which form, by the bye, it is still almost universally employed—this apparatus is called the lead,—so called with much propriety because it consists essentially of a lump of lead or other heavy weight attached to a small rope. Knots in the rope enable the sailor who manipulates the lead to note at a glance the depth to which it sinks. Most ocean travelers have seen a sailor heaving the lead repeatedly at the side of the ship and noting the depth of the water, particularly as the ship approached the Long Island shore.

While this simple form of lead suffices for ordinary purposes, when the chief information sought is as to whether the water is deeper than the draft of the ship, it is at best only a rough and ready means of testing the depth in relatively shallow waters. For deeper waters and to test with greater accuracy the depths of uncharted regions, and in particular to determine the character of the sea bottom at any given place, more elaborate apparatuses are employed. One of the most useful of these is the invention of the late Lord Kelvin. In this the lead is replaced by a cannon ball, perforated and containing a cylinder which is detached when the weight reaches the bottom and is drawn to the surface filled with sand or mud, the cannon ball remaining at the bottom. In another form of patent lead, a float becomes detached so soon as the weight strikes the bottom and comes at once to the surface, thus recording the fact that the bottom has been reached,—a fact not always easy to appreciate by the mere feel of the line when the water is fairly deep.

It is obvious that however well informed the navigator may be as to his precise latitude and longitude, he can feel no safety unless he is equally well informed as to the depth of the water, the proximity of land, the presence or absence of shallows in the region, and the like. He must, therefore, as a matter of course, be provided with maps and charts on which these things are recorded. From the days when navigation first became a science, unceasing efforts have been made to provide such maps and charts for every known portion of the globe. Geographical surveys, with the aid of the method of triangulation, have been made along all coasts, and elaborate series of soundings taken for a long distance from the coast line, and there are now few regions into which a ship ordinarily sails, or is likely to be carried by accident, for which elaborate charts, both of coast lines and of soundings, have not been provided. The experienced navigator is able to direct his ship with safety along coasts that he visits for the first time, or to enter any important harbor on the globe without requiring the services of a local pilot,—albeit the desire to take no undue risk makes it usual to accept such services.

Time was, however, when maps and charts were not to be had, and when in consequence the navigator who started on his voyages of exploration was undertaking a feat never free from hazard. Until the time of Mercator there was not even uniformity of method among map makers in the charting of regions that had been explored. The thing seems simple enough now, thanks to the maps with which every one has been familiar since childhood. But it required no small exercise of ingenuity to devise a reasonably satisfactory method of representing on a flat surface regions that in reality are distributed over the surface of a globe. The method devised by Mercator, and which, as everyone knows, is now universally adopted, consists in drawing the meridians as parallel lines, giving therefore a most distorted presentation of the globe, in which the distance between the meridians at the poles—where in reality there is no distance at all—is precisely as great as at the equator. To make amends for this distortion, the parallels of latitude are not drawn equidistant, as in reality they practically are on the globe, but are spaced farther and farther apart, as we advance from the equator toward either pole. The net result is that an island in the arctic region would be represented on the map several times as large as an island actually the same size but located near the equator. Doubtless most of us habitually conceive Alaska and Greenland to be vastly more extensive regions than they really are, because of our familiarity with maps showing this so-called "Mercator's projection."

Of course maps are also made that hold to the true proportions, representing the lines of latitude as equidistant and the meridians of longitude as lines converging to a point at the poles. But while such a map as this has certain advantages—giving, for example, a correct notion of the relative sizes of polar and other land masses—it is otherwise confusing inasmuch as places that really lie directly in the north and south line cannot be so represented except just at the middle of the map, and it is very difficult for the ordinary user of the map to gain a clear notion as to the actual points of the compass. A satisfactory compromise may be effected, however, by using Mercator's projection for maps showing wide areas, while the other method is employed for local maps.