Coast Survey Chart of San Francisco Bay, 1859

The story of this map

Before the bridge, before the cable cars, the Golden Gate was a problem to be solved with a lead line. The United States Coast Survey, under its superintendent Alexander Dallas Bache, sent its triangulators, topographers and hydrographers to measure the entrance to San Francisco Bay, and this 1859 chart is the result. Our restored print is made from the Library of Congress copy.

It is a chart, so its beauty is a working beauty. Thousands of tiny soundings speckle the water, tightening into dense rows over the shoals and bars where a careless captain would come to grief. The hills of the Marin headlands and the San Francisco peninsula are rendered in fine hachures that give the land real relief. An inset, three coastal profile views, drawn as the shore would appear from a ship’s deck, and a block of printed sailing directions complete the sheet. This is the same survey team whose work underlies every later chart of the bay.

Sailors, rowers, Marin and city dwellers all find something to love here. It suits a study, a boat-house wall or a hallway in a house with a view of the water. It is listed in our American Cities collection and pairs with the 1868 bird’s-eye view of San Francisco, which shows what the surveyors were charting the way in to.

Printed to order on archival matte paper and framed in the country of delivery.

Before and after

Left: the archive scan exactly as published. Right: the file that goes to the printer.

Archive scanRestored

Restoration notes

Restoration plan: crop scan margins, balance colour cast and levels while keeping the paper tone, remove library stamps and scanner artefacts if present, gentle sharpening. No repainting of original content.

Every print carries its archive credit on the packing slip. Paper tone and small imperfections of the original are kept on purpose; nothing is redrawn.