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top: Ben Schmidt has plotted all voyages from the ICOADS Matthew Maury collection of American shipping from about 1785 to 1860, assembled mostly before the Civil War. Ships tracks in black, plotted on a white background, show the outlines of the continents and the predominant tracks of the trade winds. His project is data visualisation which he says ‘are like narratives: they suggest interpretations, but don’t require them. Maury’s nineteenth century logs (with ‘merely’ millions of points) lets us think through in microcosm the general problems of reading historical data.’ sappingattention.blogspot.ca
above: an undated nineteenth century Portuguese navigational chart of the harbour, the port, the docks and the canal system at Newcastle upon Tyne. There is nothing on this chart that does not bear directly on navigation and ships. Land, is literally the paper, unmarked and unarticulated except for buildings seen from the water. After the macroscale of the voyage crossing the oceans, the microscale of the port must also be navigated.
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