THE HYDROGRAPHER'S DEPARTMENT OF THE 

 BRITISH ADMIRALTY. 



By Howard Pim. 



This victory will not be gained in the interests of Germany alone. 

 We shall in this struggle, as so often before, represent the common 

 interests of the world, for it will be fought not only to win recognition 

 for ourselves but for the freedom of the seas. — {Germany and the Next 

 War. By General Bernhardi, p i68). 



A vain hope, for the freedom of the seas /ia.y been zvon, and 

 belongs to-day to the whole brotherhood of seamen, without dis- 

 tinction of race or nationality. This has come about mainly 

 through the work of the Hydrographer's Department of the 

 British Admiralty, and a summary of this work is the subject of 

 my paper. It is short, because of the limited time allowed, in- 

 complete because I have not had access to a full series of Depart- 

 mental reports, and contains few personal touches because these 

 reports are laconic in the extreme. We are seldom allowed so 

 much behind the scenes as in 1881, when we are told: — 



The North Coast of Borneo has been so swept by Sulu pirates thai 

 now these are the only people with any real knowledge of the coast. The 

 services of an old pirate were therefore obtained, and the names which 

 appear on the coast survey are mainly dependent upon his information. 



In order ])etter to understand what has been accomplished, 

 I prefix a short statement as to the position of navigation and of 

 the knowledge of the seas up to 1795, when the Department was 

 created. 



These limitations prevent more than the merest allusion to 

 the wonderful voyages of discovery of the Portuguese in the 

 fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, or to the fact 



That the praise of the application of the compass to these remote 

 discoveries is due to the Portugals who tirst began to open the windows 

 of the world to let it see itself. 



Henry the Navigator, third son of John I of Portugal, was 



The true foundation of the greatness, not of Portugal alone but of the 

 whole Christian world in marine affairs and especially of these heroic 

 endeavours of the English (whose flesh and blood he was) 



for his mother was Phillipa, a daughter of John of Gaunt. 



I deal with a later time, for discoveries came first, running 

 surveys followed, and finally surveys executed on rigorously 

 accurate principles, with the resulting charts and sailing direc- 

 tions. 



The earliest known charts — and they are of remarkable 

 accuracy — were attached to the Portulani or sailing directions 

 for the Mediterranean, which were in general use in the thir- 

 teenth century, but must have originated long before this, and 

 without the aid of the compass. A book of sailing directions for 

 the coast from Scotland to Gibraltar was written in the fifteenth 

 century. A map of the coasts of the British Isles, and of 



A 



