US Navy Chart of the Coast of China & Japan, 1855

The story of this map

In 1854 Commodore Perry’s squadron anchored in Edo Bay and obtained the treaty that opened Japan to American ships, and the Navy’s next task was to chart the waters it had just entered. Lieutenant William L. Maury’s Chart of the Coast of China and of the Japan Islands, published in 1855, is the result: a large sheet covering the whole western Pacific seaboard from Hainan and Canton up the China coast to Korea and Japan, and out across the ocean to the Ryukyus, the Bonins and the Marianas, with the squadron’s tracks, soundings and anchorages laid down.

The Library of Congress copy has a provenance of its own. It belonged to Millard Fillmore, the president who had dispatched Perry three years earlier, and came to the Library with his papers. At 12,278 pixels across, the scan holds every sounding.

As a wall chart it is the eastern counterpart of our Coast Survey harbour charts: the same engraved sea, the same lettering, the same pale paper, but with the coastline of Asia drawn for the first time by American hands. The plate marks and the folds of the sheet are kept.

Printed to order on archival matte paper, framed in the country of delivery. The nearly square sheet floats on an aged-paper margin at rectangular sizes.

Before and after

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

Archive scanRestored

Restoration notes

Restoration: cropped the scanner bed and mount margins, corrected levels and colour cast while keeping the paper tone, removed dust and specks, applied gentle sharpening. Fold lines, stains and period annotations are kept where they belong to the object; nothing is redrawn.

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.