Nantucket Shoals Nautical Chart, 1860

The story of this map

The waters east and south of Nantucket have a reputation. The shoals shift, the tide runs hard across them, and for two centuries they were among the most feared stretches of the American coast. In 1860 the US Coast Survey published this sheet — Monomoy and the Nantucket Shoals down to Muskeget Channel — at the 1:80,000 coast-chart scale, and it is the chart a careful captain would have wanted aboard.

Visually it is all about water. The land is a thin edge at the top and side; the rest of the sheet is a great field of sounding figures, with the shoal outlines threading through them like sandbars seen from a gull’s height. Two small coastal views are engraved on the sheet, the kind of profile a navigator would hold up against the real horizon to fix his position. Muskeget Channel, between Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, sits at the lower edge.

The Coast Survey did this work with lead lines and triangulation, one boat and one sounding at a time, which is worth remembering when you look at how many numbers are on this sheet.

It is a natural for a Nantucket or Cape house, a sailor’s study, or a hallway of framed charts. Part of our Framed Nautical Charts collection. 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.